 He wrote the Bogey golfer's guide to Michigan golf courses. So he has his priorities straight here. These guys, by the way, these guys have had season tickets to the Lions for about 75 years through their dad. You talk about an eternal optimist, Detroit Lions. There's Spartans, however, and we had a great victory last weekend. Thank you very much. But, you know, for those of you who are Wolverines, it always goes in cycles, so I don't think we can gloat. But let me just say that, particularly being here, an organization that cares about people having good jobs and good pay, with good health care, with retirement security, with the quality of life for themselves throughout life and their children and grandchildren, it's a delight to be here because, you know, the United Auto Workers, those are the goals of the United Auto Workers. I am, you're looking at someone who's very, very blessed. I was raised by a single parent mom. No one in my family had power, money, or position. And all I ever wanted to be was a U.S. member of Congress. It turned out to be a congressman, governor, ambassador, all by age 50. If somebody had told me that, I would have thought I had died and gone to heaven. And it would not have happened without the help of Greg and Bob Morris and their father and the United Auto Workers. And a lot of other good people don't get me wrong. My own family as well. But, but, fortunately for me and for thousands of other people, the United Auto Workers didn't just care about their union members. They cared about society in general. They cared about world peace. When you look at the film of Martin Luther King with the March in Washington, Arm in Arm is Walter Ruther. The unions helped finance the civil rights movement. Human rights, civil rights, women's rights, fair wages. People, you know, I get tired of people who don't know anything about unions telling me, oh, they're antiquated, they don't do this or that. The United Auto Workers understood automation. They understood robots. They understood all that in the early 50s. They negotiated that to allow the companies to automate. It did not stand in the way like perhaps some people think unions did. And they didn't just worry about health care for their members. They worried if they supported, as I do this day, national health insurance for everybody. And, you know, it's refreshing to know this. They advocated more fuel, Walter Ruther was advocating for more fuel-efficient vehicles in the early 50s trying to convince the companies to think about a broader mix of automobiles. Hi, Hillary Chambers. Good to see you, too. With Sandy Levin, no less, although you weren't with him when we were years ago. But anyway, this is a, it's a fabulous union and Bob is going to talk about his dad's role. His dad was one of those people who helped create and build the union and make it the modern progressive force. It remains today. I might also add that one of my favorites is not just Walter Ruther, who I never met, but Doug Fraser. We would never have been able to do the Chrysler rescue without Doug Fraser in the United Auto Workers and the American Labor Movement. It was saving the jobs that we cared about. It wasn't perpetuating the corporate name. But you read about Iacocca. The truth is we had to get the bill through Congress. And Doug Fraser was more influential in that effort than Lee. And Lee did a good job. And the rest of us, from Tip O'Neill to our Michigan delegation, we were helping lead the way. So it's, it's just fun to be here to talk, to talk about these things and remind people. By the way, Ron Geddelfinger is one of my real favorites. He's a retired president because a few years ago he, he actually made me the United Auto Workers member of the board of directors of the new Chrysler corporation. So you talk about poetic justice after 30 years. It was kind of nice. Who knew? Anyway, Bob Morris isn't just an author and a husband and a friend and a brother and a uncle and also a great uncle. He's a public servant in his own right. He's not going to tell you that. But he's worked with the Speaker of the House in Lansing. He worked in my administration. He worked with the Wayne County Executive. He's been an expert in transportation and labor, employment issues, all those things. And he still remains a Detroit Lions fan. He's now an author. A book about his dad, it's hard to write about your dad. I don't know if you keep referring to him as Ken instead of dad in the book. All I can tell you is his dad was a fabulous person and his mother must have been to put up with him. But no, I mean he's just worked all the time. A fabulous labor leader, somebody that has given so much to those of us in Michigan in politics and society. So I'm glad you wrote this book. It tells us a story about the union movement and the battles to just survive that most people are not aware of that we all take for granted. So I want to give you a friend that I'll never take for granted, Bob Morris. Thank you, Jim. And thank you to all of you who have come today on a weekday, a busy day for all of you. This is a special day for me. So I'm going to just spend a couple of minutes on some special people. First of all, to Jim and Janet Blanchard. I'm so glad you're here. These are two people who have been friends of every single one of the Morris family and family members. And we appreciate that friendship. To Jim, who wrote the introduction to my book, I really, really appreciated that. Thank you. And as has been discussed, let's be clear, Jim Blanchard is a congressman. Not only did he save Chrysler, but in my mind, far more importantly, he saved the tens of thousands of jobs related to Chrysler. Most of which were UAW jobs, but he saved jobs at a time that was very necessary for our state and our country. As a governor, frankly, there is no better friend to labor and to working men and women than Jim Blanchard. Why do I know it? Because my brother and I were there. We saw it. It's simple as that. I want to thank the Economic Policy Institute and EPI's Ross Rosenbray and Christopher Dorsi and the staff for making this event possible. Roberta Stanley, thank you. Roberta's a pistol. She gets things done. And when she decided to go to work on this, it got done and I couldn't be more happy, but more significantly, I was happy to be her colleague, but I was really happy and am happy to be her friend. I wish my wife, Terri, could have been here. She is the love of my life. Unfortunately, she had a commitment with her friends to be in Peru, hiking up mountains and seeing old cities and I think doing some R&R. A special thanks to my brother Greg and Audrey Morris, my sister-in-law. Their help in this effort of getting this book done was immense and important. They helped me every step of the way. And with Greg, really, he's a part of every page in the book, every word, many of which we witnessed together without his approval, his acknowledgement that this was the right thing, those words wouldn't be on the page. So thank you. I love you both very much. Thank you. I appreciate it. And now, as we say, on with the show. Built in Detroit. This is my book, the story of the UAW, a company and a gangster. Everybody wants to know who the gangster is. We'll get to that in a minute. Built in Detroit. You can look at this picture of Detroit photo taken in the early 1930s. It's a city that in some ways hasn't changed too much, the skyline. But in other ways, has changed dramatically. As Governor Blanchard said, I am kind of a transportation geek, so I love this photo because for those of you, how many people have Detroit connections? Okay, a lot of us. These are not the Bob Lowe boats. These are the boats, the passenger ships that took people up north to their resorts to vacation during the summer or whatever. It was the preferred way to go to Northern Michigan. If you didn't go that route, you took trains up. And if you tried to drive to go to Northern Michigan, it was a six, eight, ten-hour trip. The roads weren't there as simple as that. It was trains, it was ships like this. Detroit, the Penobscot building, the Buell building. This is downtown Detroit in the 30s. It's changed a lot. It's still there. One thing that I did not realize from the top of the Penobscot building in the 30s, you could go to the top and go to an observation deck and look out for miles and miles and miles. Detroit, 1934, 1935, was acknowledged nationally as the city of champions. It was the home of the Red Wings, the Stanley Cup champions, the home of the Detroit Tigers, World Series champions, and the home of the Detroit Lions, the champions of the NFL. It was also home of one of the greatest boxers in history, Joe Lewis. Detroit, a bustling town, the Kerns Block, the Kerns Department Store. I am pleased and proud to say that I work downtown in downtown Detroit, and it's great to see the bustle coming back. And that's really, really nice. Detroit, Detroit's a story about a young man, my dad, Ken Morris, who comes to Detroit. Story about the fledgling United Auto Workers. Their efforts to organize auto factories. Story about how auto companies hired monsters to eliminate weakened strong unions and strong union leadership. And then it's a story about the investigations, the effort to find these perpetrators, the Kief Offer Committee. There'll be some images from the Kief Offer Committee that come right out of the movie on the waterfront. For all of you Godfather geeks, it's there to, you know, you can see it there, too. We have three major things. We talk about the development of the UAW in the 1930s, the fight for a clean union, and the rise of Walter Ruther in the UAW. It's also the story of a corrupt UAW official. It's about the terrorist activities that took place, beatings, assassination attempts against UAW officials in the 1940s and the effort to bring those people to justice. This is my dad, Ken Morris. It's a high school graduation picture. Ken grew up with nothing. I could tell more stories about the nothing side of things, but I won't. He should have gone to college. He graduated from high school with honors on top in his class, but that wasn't the way it was to be. So he spent his first job was selling door to door, kind of a fuller brush kind of guy. And he didn't sell in Pittsburgh. He sold in the small towns outside of Pittsburgh. The company store, the places where there were company stores, they were the competition. And his buddies decided, you know what? We can do this in Pittsburgh. This is 1934, 35. We can do this here. Well, we can travel across the country and go door to door to do sales and go to Detroit, Chicago, St. Louis. We'll be gone a year. It'll be a great experience. So he and his buddies pack up. They leave Pittsburgh and get to Detroit first stop within a week. All of them leave Ken. Ken's the second from the left there. All of them leave Ken and go home. Ken demonstrating a stubborn streak that will be there all his life. Ken stays in Detroit. He becomes, he can't find work though. He becomes a step above being homeless. He ends up running out of the boarding house he's staying because he doesn't have the rent to pay. Ends up at the Mariners Church Rescue Mission down by Jefferson and stays there for several months looking for work. Finally, he hears about a job, a job at the toughest automobile plant in the city of Detroit, the Briggs Manufacturing Company. Briggs, a lot of people will know about Fisher Body that makes bottle bodies for General Motors. Briggs made auto bodies for everybody else. If you remember Briggs Stadium, Briggs is the man. He made such a fortune at this. He could buy yachts, houses, and he bought the Detroit Tigers. Rebuilt Tiger Stadium, Briggs Stadium. This is the epicenter of their empire. It is on the east side of Detroit, stretches from Mack Avenue in the frontier, down to Warren Avenue and employed 30,000 people. It was a tough, tough place to work. You worked at Briggs, and when we talk about the company and built in Detroit, Briggs is that company. It's a place where wages, $0.43 an hour, if you made the quota, and everything was set up so you wouldn't make production quotas. Safety standards were the worst in the industry. You could work in some departments. The air was filled with metal particles. After a few months, many people started just coughing up blood, and pretty soon they would disappear and never to be heard of from again. You could, as Ken did, go to the tool crib to get a glove. And something would be in the glove. Shook it out. There's a finger pops out. The guy, tool crib manager, looks at it, tosses it away. I have met Briggs workers, and there's digits missing. I mean, it was a tough place to work. No health insurance, no job security, no grievance procedure. In short, there was no dignity. In 1935, things would change with the passage of the Wagner Act and the enforcement procedure, the National Labor Relations Board. And in Detroit, at Briggs, in Flint, at about the same time, late 1936, 37, all kinds of plants start to get organized. Briggs was one of those plants led by a guy named Amo Macy. Amo would be a big part of the UAW, a big part of our lives. This doesn't look like much, but these are the UAW local 212 members. Local 212 was the Briggs local, a very innovative, a great local for a long time, or for many years, the biggest and largest local inside the UAW. They were called the Dead End Kids. They got into trouble every place, with the international on picket lines. They had a flying squadron that assisted people all over the place. Standing on your right there is Ken. He loved local 212. He had no family in Detroit. Local 212 became his family. Some of these people were like uncles to Greg and I, and their spouses were like aunts, very, very special people. This is Amo Macy and with Walter Ruther. And it's important. Amo Macy was the leader of Local 212, even when he wasn't president of Local 212. He was the leader. Ken was a great friend of Amo, and it's important. Until the day Ken died, his mind is laced with dementia. I'd say, dad, were you an amazing man? You'd say, you're damn right I was an amazing man. But it's very important. And these guys would all fight over the years, just like brothers. They would all fight. But at the end of the day, Amo and Ken were Ruther men. And that's a very, very important lesson about the UAW. Now, built in Detroit is the story about some other men in our city. And their jobs were to try to destroy the UAW and the strong labor leadership in the union. On your left in the bow tie is a guy named Harry Bennett. How many people know that name? Harry Bennett, a few. Harry Bennett was Henry Ford's right-hand man. His job was to implement anything Henry Ford wanted by whatever means necessary. He's there with a bow tie with the first president of the UAW, Homer Martin. Homer Martin would leave in disgrace from the UAW, because Harry Bennett totally co-opted him. Right there is Santo Perón, one of the toughest gangsters who ever walked the streets of Detroit. You wanted somebody killed, you can go see Santo Perón. You wanted to bust a union, Santo Perón was your man. You wanted illegal booze, illegal immigrants. Santo Perón could take care of it. He wasn't a member of the mafia. He was a maverick. He was his own guy. But he was a tough fella. And in fact, time and time again, when the police thought they had this guy, there were people who were going to testify against him. Those people would somehow get a phone call. And the message was simple. If you testify, someone in your family, your wife, your children, someone will die within a month. That's it. People did not testify against Santo Perón. Built in Detroit's about strikes. Strikes in the 30s, the turbulent 30s. And it's very important about these strikes. Yes, the UAW had strong important leadership as did so many other labor unions. But, and this is very important, without the men and women, the rank and file members of the UAW, there wouldn't have been a union. These people put their lives and livelihood on the line when they were on picket lines. You could get whacked by a billy club, be incapacitated for days, maybe forever, not be able to go to work. You could be spotted, ID'd, blacklisted, not be able to go to work. It was a, these people, I have never put my life on the line for my job. Sorry, Governor. I mean, I never have. And I don't know too many people who have. These people did. And that's an important message. Now this photo is probably one of the most famous images that's ever been captured on film from a labor perspective. This is the Battle of the Overpass, 1937, May. Walter Ruther, the open coat there is Dick Frankenstein and some other UAW guys are helping to lead an informational picket at Ford. They're standing on the overpass, outside of the Rouge Plant in Dearborn, a public, a public bridge. Harry Bennett's thugs, and I should add, Harry Bennett ran the largest private army in the world. He didn't get people from retired police forces. He was on the Michigan Parole Board. He got his recruits right out of Jackson Prison. And some of these guys, you can kinda tell, may have come from Jackson Prison. They came out and they beat the hell out of Walter, Frankenstein and other UAW people, not only there, but elsewhere. I can still remember Walter talking about this. And he talked about how when the beating was over, he was dragged down the steps of the overpass and his head hit every one of those 48 steps. It was an amazing time. This is the photo taken after at a union member's house. And I love these presentations because a few weeks ago I met a woman, the woman whose house this was in. And she was a little girl and she remembered the photo being taken. She remembered the men there and she said, you know, that photo doesn't even begin to demonstrate how bruised and battered these two men were. There are other strikes. This is the federal screw strike. And it's an important strike because federal screw was a plant located around Michigan Avenue and Livernois. And it was a UAW plant in Walter Ruther's region, west side. And they decided, federal screw, that they were gonna break the contract, tear it up. And they did. Well, Walter, you know, he said, my God, if a company could just rip up the contract, what good is there in having a union? You can't have it. And then this is a photo of the Detroit police escorting the strikebreakers, the scabs, into the plant. People who worked in the plant lived in the area. They're upper flat looking out, screaming, shouting epitaphs. It was a tough time. Walter called all of the flying squadrons, including Local 212 and every other good union support he could get to say, we've gotta make sure these scabs can't keep this company in operation. Later that day, things got out of hand. Workers, people who were caught by the police, were attacked. The patons were coming down on people's heads. People were injured. People were arrested. Ken caught a belly club just in the ear. And he ran like hell when the horse came. He wasn't, you know, this is scary stuff. It's life and death stuff. But the flying squadron, the pickets, the people who were fighting for their jobs fought back. They picked up stones, pieces of wood, whatever they could find and threw right back at the police. It was a tough time. At the end of the day, though, the company had to come back to the table because they were shut down. And within a week that strike was over. By World War II, end of the 30s, start of the 40s, unions are here to stay. The battle, many of the battles, there are gonna be many more battles, but the key battles were won by the UAW. Detroit's gonna become the arsenal for democracy. A little more on that in a second. But on the east side of Detroit, at the Briggs, Mack Avenue stamping plant, something was going on. There's gonna be a relationship that's gonna develop between the Briggs manufacturing company, the gangsters, Santo Perón and a corrupt UAW regional director. This is Ken, 1941. A few months before this, he's working in the plant. There's a wildcat strike at Briggs. Ken gets fired for trying to stop the strike. And on his pink slip, it's got the approval of the UAW regional director, Melvin Bishop. These guys, Ken, his coworkers, they're all good people. He's gonna join the Army Air Corps. World War II starts. He joins the Army Air Corps, gets stationed in Texas. And my brother and I are damn glad he did because he ended up meeting my mom there. And he was very successful as a sergeant in the Army Air Corps. I kind of viewed him like Burt Lancaster, from here to eternity without the sex part, but then I realized he got married. I don't know. But he was always told his wife, I mean, part of the discussion is after the war, they're gonna go back. Back, oops, wrong way. They're gonna go back to Detroit. And they were going to, he was gonna continue his career in the UAW. While he's away, as Ken's coming back, he gets elected by acclamation as recording secretary of Local 212. But he gets back and he hears something. He hears about beatings that are taking place against Local 212 activists. Rough beatings, not just being pushed around, but brutal beatings. Ken, while he's back, writes an editorial, scathing editorial about the Briggs Company. Two weeks later, he's in the hospital fighting for his life. He's beaten while he's getting out of his car an old 1938 Ford. He opens the door and he doesn't remember anything else. Two men walked up, didn't say a word, they had blackjacks and they beat the hell out of them. Had two fractured skulls, fractures in his skull, broken arm, broken leg, broken ribs. His eyes weren't looking too good. In fact, the doctors wouldn't let him look at himself in the mirror for a week. This photo was taken by a Detroit news journalist who came in and snuck in one night when Ken was sleeping. But who were the hoodlums? Who were these people? It was gonna take a long time to find out. There were guesses, but how do you prove it? Ken's gonna go on. He's gonna have a great career in the UAW. He's gonna become president of his Local 212. He's gonna become a UAW regional director. He's gonna be active in a lot of things. Amel Mazie's gonna be with him. And he's here with Guy Nunn. Many of you will remember that name, a great communicator for the UAW. But who was responsible? The Detroit Free Press called the attacks against the Local 212 members terror, terrorism. Who was responsible for this terrorism? Ken was the last of the Briggs beating victims. But unfortunately, things are gonna escalate. Now I wanna take a veer a little bit in another direction. I wanna talk about the Ruthers. I wanna talk about Roy Ruther, Victor and Walter Ruther. Roy Ruther, he was one of the key, without Roy Ruther, there probably wouldn't have been a successful Flint sit-down strike. It's as simple as that. He was an incredible organizer. I'm sure he organized Alan's life a lot. But at any rate, Roy was very special. And I'm also known as someone you could always talk to of all the Ruther brothers. He was the one, if you had an issue, go talk to Roy. Victor, one of the great communicators in labor history. He could get on a car with a bullhorn, sound car, and he could give a speech to get picketers fired up to stand and stand tough. But Walter, Walter was special. It's gonna take him 10, 11 years to become president of the UAW. It's a tough fight. He finally gets there in 1946. Wins his vote by 126 votes, I think it was. And he starts to make changes. He starts to do things. And I tell this story, and I love to say it in Detroit. When we think of Ruther in Detroit, far, far, far too many people think of it as a freeway. The Ruther freeway. It's true. People don't know who Walter Ruther was. And it's a damn shame. Time Magazine in 1999 listed Walter as one of the 100 most influential people of the 20th century. You know, we have the arsenal for democracy, but few people know, few people know that it was Walter Ruther who came up with the concept, 1940. Came up with the concept, 500. Auto capacity was such that you could build 500 planes a day. The auto industry, leaders of the auto industry said this guy's nuts. He's a communist. He's a socialist. He's a labor leader. What does he know about this stuff? But in fact, that is exactly what happened. An incredible negotiator. Health insurance, the kinds of things Governor Blanchard talked about were created. He helped create, and in fact, I believe created the American middle class as we know it. Civil rights leader, Martin Luther King, Caesar Chavez. The march on Washington, I was there. There were five people who spoke that day. Walter Ruther was one of them. Creator of the first HMO in the United States. It's now half. First environmental speech I ever heard is 1966, Kobo Hall, delivered by Walter Ruther. And I can remember it like it was yesterday. In April, 1948, Walter comes home from a meeting to his home on Appaline Street between eight and seven mile road northwest side of Detroit. He's talking to his wife who had saved some dinner. He's at the kitchen sink. There's a man standing outside with a shotgun aiming at his chest. At the split second that that trigger was pulled, Walter turned and instead of hitting him straight on, he was hit directly in the arm. Doctor said that arm has to come off. Walter said no. He said, well, we'll put it in a stationary position then. Walter said no. He created his own rehabilitation program, carpentry, and brought much movement back to his arm. That was an amazing story. Yet, just a year later, Victor Ruther is gonna be sitting in his living room, Mark Twain on the west side of Detroit. He's reading a book. A shotgun blast goes off and his face is nearly torn off. He loses an eye, scarred for life. An incredible thing. Who did this stuff? And I'm gonna read something. Take a pause because I think it's important. At Ford Hospital, when Victor is there, Roy Ruther is standing with his wife, holding his wife's hand. And he's asked, well, what are you gonna be next? And Roy says, naturally I've thought of it. State police have offered to post guard and I've accepted it. I'm not gonna resign. I'm not gonna go into hiding or anything like that. We're fighting for good, clean unionism. Our record stands by and for itself. After Walter was shot, Victor and I talked this over and we agreed to continue the good fight. Whoever has done this represents forces that are against clean unionism. Whether they're employers, fascists, communists, makes no difference. We can't be, this can't be fought by resigning. So built in Detroit, my book becomes a little more than just history. It becomes a mystery. Who's responsible for all of these things? It's gonna be a one man grand jury. Perone's gonna get to the judge of that one man grand jury. UAW's gonna hire its own private investigators because they don't trust the Detroit police department. And then the Kief Offer Committee in February 1951 is gonna come to town. The Kief Offer Committee. And I love this photo. For those of you who were seeing on the waterfront, there's an image of this with I think Lee J. Cobb testifying. But the Kief Offer Committee was so important because for the first time, people saw news as it was happening. These hearings were televised live on the graining black and white TVs. A lot of people in this room don't know, but in the 50s, in the 50s, you got about 15 minutes of news. Period. And it was some guy reading the news. That was it. So it was very important that people in Detroit were glued to their TV sets watching this. They heard Amel Mazie testify that they were sick. The fact that the perpetrators of the Briggs beatings and the Ruther shootings had not been brought to justice. Then Santa Perone testified. He actually went in hiding for a while but finally was brought in. He said, I don't know nothing about unions. I don't know nothing about Briggs. I don't know nothing. Then Dean Robinson, Walter Briggs' son-in-law, he testifies, president of the company. He's in sunglasses and an evening jacket. He testifies that there's no way Briggs would be involved with mobsters. I'm a member of a country club. There's no way that would happen. I'm a member of the Detroit Athletic Club. There's no way that would happen. We would not hang around with those kinds of people. Well, in fact, when the Kiefhofer completed its report, they said in the United States, there is no company that most, that demonstrated most of how the underworld was interlocked with legitimate business. UAW, this whole Kiefhofer committee rekindled the investigation to go after the perpetrators. UAW investigators, one of whom is gonna die on Lake St. Clair in the wintertime a few years later. UAW investigators find a guy named Donald Ritchie. They get him to confess. He voluntarily does it. He says, I was there the night Walter Ruther was shot. I was in the car. I had heard the retort of the gun. A few moments later, my uncle climbed into the car. He said, well, we shot the bastard and I knocked him down. Got in the car, he went back to the Canton Bar on Jefferson Avenue and Perone's son-in-law gave Ritchie an envelope. He found a woman, didn't open the envelope until later the next day, looked at it, $5,000. That was the price, his part of the price for the Ruther shootings. After the confession, Ritchie realized his life wouldn't be worth a plug nickel. So he escaped Detroit police custody and he recanted everything. But anybody who heard Ritchie's testimony believed what he said was true. There's gonna be trials, there's gonna be hearings, grand juries, no one is ever gonna go to jail for the beatings for the shootings of UAW officials. But then when we step back, we look at who contributed, who didn't, Walter Briggs is gonna die, his company sold to Chrysler. The Briggs name, and I viewed it when Tiger Stadium was torn down a few years ago, to me that kind of was almost a big period in the Briggs legacy. Santa Perone, and we laugh about this, but Santa Perone was just a mean, mean, bad son of a bitch. Well, it's true, and we can't lose this. He's gonna get, he had a car wash where he was running his operation on Grashett, seven mile road. Turns on the ignition to his Pontiac, blows up. He loses a leg in testicle and other parts of his body, but he still manages to kill people, tough guy. UAW leaders thrive, as Jim said, they contribute to our society, they get involved. They were part of good public policy, social justice throughout Michigan and throughout the country. And in a shameless plug, this is my dad introducing Jack Kennedy in Labor Day 1960, a rally he organized. A rally who, Kennedy's advanced man, who I came to know many years later, said was the best UAW rally in the state. I don't know about that, but it was a big deal for Ken. But it's more important to understand that Ken was involved in helping people. He was so proud that he could work with people like Sandy Loven and Jim Blanchard and help them with their career. He also helped Phil Hart. Phil Hart was Walter Briggs' son-in-law. Ken had absolutely no reason to wanna work with Phil Hart, but they ran into each other at a Democratic Party meeting and they started talking, and they became fast friends. Governor Williams, Jim Menon Williams is part of that crowd. These were people that Ken would take pride in helping, not because he wanted people under his thumb, but he thought they would do the right thing. On my final slide here, a lot of people said, all right, you wrote this book about ancient history. What's it got to do in terms of today? Well, I believe it's got a lot to do with today. I believe there's a relationship between the 99% versus 1% wealth divide. That's a big deal. I believe, you know, I listened to the Maureen Joe people, all these people talk about all the decline in the middle class, but they never talk about, in the same sentence, the decline of union membership. There is a direct link. The economic recovery's going well on Wall Street. Better than ever. Detroit built forward to making 20 million a year. President GM, 15 million a year. And I don't begrudge them. It's fine. My problem is the average American earner is making what they earned in 1973. That is a problem. Labor unions love them or not. I'm not saying everyone's perfect. I'm not saying the UAW is perfect. But labor unions have fought for job security, safety in the workplace, decent pay, a piece of the American dream. Who else has done that in our society? Who else? It's true in the 1930s, it's true today. That's my story, I'm sticking to it. And that's all folks. We're here for some questions and comments. You will be here to sell a few books if you're interested. What you can find here and also online, Bob wanted me to mention. We're gonna have a question and answer period, but I just wanted to take a moment to talk about some of the things that jumped out at me when I read Bob's book, which I do recommend to everybody because it's a very unusual, personal story intertwined with public policy and labor history and the history of Detroit. But one of the things that really stands out in the book is the chaos of what it was like in 1937 in particular to be trying to organize unions at a time when you had the Wagner Act, you had this new law that encouraged collective bargaining, but there was very little history in Detroit of collective bargaining at that point. These massive corporations were completely opposed. He talks in the book about the Ford Motor Company, which and Harry Bennett, but I just wanna read one passage from a different book to give you an idea of how extensive, it wasn't just that they had a private army. Every corporation, every large corporation in America virtually was engaged in spying on its workers, infiltrating their organizations. I'm gonna read a paragraph from, there is power in a union. Released in 1937, the Law Follett Committee Report cited labor spying to be a common, almost universal practice in American industry, enlisted no fewer than 2,500 U.S. corporations engaged in anti-union espionage and trickery. Nearly 4,000 spies and detectives, some from the Pinkerton Detective Agency had been involved in an estimated aggregate cost to business and hence consumers of almost $10 million in the years 33 to 36. The extent of the spying alone was considerable, with as many as 93 unions having been infiltrated. GM was the largest client, the most flagrant offender, spending $800,000 on espionage and said to possess the most super system of spies yet devised in any American corporation. They even spied on the assistant secretary of labor while he was meeting with a GM official. The Law Follett Commission said that the spies, there were three layers of spies in some corporations. Spies spying on each other, spying on management, it got to be just out of control. Just to personalize that a little bit, Dick Frankenstein, who was at the Bell of the Overpass, just before that point, it had his family friend. His wife had become great friends with another couple and for about a year and a half they were great friends. Company spies were elected as union officials. Well, so you have this culture, you have a civil war in essence going on with private armies, machine guns at the Ford Rouge plant, aimed at the picketers. The police were, they were engaged in this war, attacking the picketers, peaceful picketers, would be run down by horses and beaten and shot by the police. But you had these young men, like Bob's dad, with no experience as union organizers, having to invent things by themselves. The Wagner Act had passed, it had election machinery, but the thing that I take away from the book is how little it was used. The way people got organized was through sit-down strikes in GM, in the tire plants in Akron at Briggs, that's how they got organized. They didn't have an election until years later. They got organized by the people in the plant, self-organizing, getting sick of having their hands mangled of the guy, there's a story of someone having his arms cut off in a press and- The press came down, his arms, their timing got, you know, factory. Nobody there to take the guy to the hospital. The plant officials don't take him to the hospital, the police come and won't take him to the hospital until someone pays them. Five bucks, they said, won't take them. So this is what people were facing, and they self-organized, they finally stood up on their hind legs, they got sick of it, and they sat down, and there's a lesson for us. The sit-down strike eventually was the Wagner Act, you know, made unions legal and encouraged collective bargaining. It was also interpreted to prohibit sit-down strikes, and they pretty much disappeared from the American labor movement, and I think something important was lost by that trade-off of people giving up their sort of God-given right to say no, and to sit down. But the story that you'll learn when you read this book about the internal UAW politics of the, you know, the warring factions, the infiltration, the fights with communists, I mean, the Communist Party was clearly very important in the early days of the labor movement because they did help teach people that they could stand up for themselves and that the corporations that were squeezing them were needed to be resisted, but the Ruthers, as you learn, worked very hard to keep the Communist Party out of the auto workers to keep the mob out and to represent the workers to the best of their ability. Bob finished with his slide. I'll just say one more thing about the conditions then and how they're similar, but they were so much worse than they are today. We have high unemployment. It makes it hard for people to demand their rights. You know, wages have been stagnant, as Bob says, the median wages for men is about the level that it was in 1993. So conditions in the United States, as we have this enormous wealth growing, are repeating the kind of inequality we had back then, but the main difference is the people were just suffering. That unemployment in Michigan was 52% in 1931. So the power of the employer to squeeze people, to know that they had the job that people needed to live and that they could crush them, they could work them to death, they could kick them out in a moment's notice. They abused the power in every way possible. They had it, they knew they had it and they abused it to the point that finally, people stood up and it was basically a revolution in American industry in Detroit and that's what this book tells. So, questions. Congressman Hurtel. Can I ask a first question? Yes. Why did you do that? Did not he agree with what Texas had for the war? Come up to the line. And how long had he been through already and it says he was a person of sight? Well, first, he came to Detroit and he grew to love Detroit and the people in it. These people were his brothers and sisters. I mean, there's no, and he, in fact, he is very successful in the military. He had a commanding officer who wanted to start an insurance firm in Dallas and my mom was pretty interested in that but he said, no, we wanna go back and continue my career and he and Doris made a deal driving back to Detroit in a snowstorm and that deal was he would run for office and at the point that he was not elected because if you don't get elected, you gotta find something to do, he would go back in the plant and go to law school like his good friend Bill Maisie did and that was the deal. Well, Ken didn't lose an election and so he continued with his career and he felt pretty confident he could have a career that could sustain his family and he did that pretty well. And he hardy lifestyle. And you know, my dad takes her to the hustle and bustle and brine of Detroit and that's pretty interesting. And it's, in fact, it was very interesting. Ken was very pleased. He found like he felt the only liberal woman from Nebraska but and I usually, I missed it as I went through the slides. I usually talk about the fact that when Ken was beaten and he managed a way to crawl to his front step and not scratched on the door. Doris opens the door, sees this, panics, hysterical as any man or woman would be and soon the police come and the police look at her and they say, little girl, where are you from? And she says, well, I'm from Nebraska. They go, little girl, you should go down to the bus station and just go home. You don't wanna be in this city. Now that story did not come from Doris. It came from Ken who was in and out of consciousness and he remembered that story of which he told that his retirement in 1963 for the first time. So, yeah, other questions, comments. The auto factories because they could, they would take African-Americans to work in the auto factories. Couldn't find a place to live, couldn't go to a restaurant. What was the core of that? Why that strong fabric of civil rights? Where did that come from? Well, first of all, in terms of Detroit, it's really important to appreciate that not only did the auto industry recruit people from the South, black and white, but the Detroit police department recruited people from the South, white, okay? And that created, there's a lot of other issues, but there's something about the UAW that Local 212 is a really good example of that. Amel Mazie wanted a diverse local. There's always an African-American who's on the Local 212 board. In 1937, he wanted to integrate the office staff, three, four women, and the women, women said, no, we're not gonna do that. And Amel believed himself to be a charmer, so he took all the women out to dinner, and they still said no. And finally, Amel said, look, we're gonna integrate. That's the way it is. You either wanna work here or you don't. One other point about Local 212, during World War II, a lot of the true integration started happening, partly because UAW contracts were kicking in, giving people seniority, so that was an element. But then, you're hiring all of these people, and African-Americans were hired, and that was part of the understanding both within the union and, frankly, by the Roosevelt administration. Let me tell another story about this. The Ford Motor Company hired a lot of black workers, and they segregated them. The black workers were in the foundries and the dirtiest, hardest jobs, and they couldn't move out, but they were grateful to have those jobs. And when the union, UAW was organizing Ford, they'd won GM in 1937. In 1940, Ford was still holding out and wouldn't recognize the union. And when they called a strike, when Walter Ruther called a strike at the Ford plant, the 20% of the workforce that was black stayed in the plant. They didn't come out, and the strike was gonna be broken if they stayed in. And the NAACP came and with a sound truck, the Walter White from the NAACP was outside talking to the black workers and explaining to them how their fate was tied up with the UAW's fate, and they would never advance if they didn't come out and join the strike. And they did. And that was super important in the union's history. Yeah. Well, she and Walter developed a relationship of intellectuals. And then later, after President Ruther developed the hide, there was, again, a continuing relationship. She came and stayed, I think stayed at their house. Certainly was there. And Lisa's book, Lisa Ruther's book, she talks about that there. There was a definite relationship. Walter's right. And it's brutal. But then, strike pledge, no strike. Strike pledge, no strike. And I'm thinking to myself, this is probably something that Walter had, may well have had, in a meeting at the White House, and there was a big discussion about whether or not workers should be able to strike during World War II. The union supported the no strike clause, which caused a lot of problems because here, the companies are making their doing real well. The management is doing real well. We're stuck at the same page. But so I think I would, yes, sir. Yeah. The term was black, so X-morty, X-morty forced it. Well, Amel Maisie was one of the great diversity, but Ken, while he was president of Global 212, so this would be in the early 50s, there's an African-American who was going to be placed as a crane operator, which was considered a skilled job in those days. And the White Force, in the plant floor, didn't want it to happen. So and this is what the industrialism, Ken, when this young man walked to the controls of the crane and stayed with him all night long. And after that, there were no problems. But that sense of which is one leaps forward. I'll bring it back to you now. Governor, if you want to jump in on this, that would be good. Let's take the lessons of the 30s. My dad went through the 30s in Chicago, where we had similar shutdown strikes and everything else. And applying to today, in the private sector, unfortunately, as the Secretary of the State of the State for General Vocal here, we are 7% of the private sector, God forbid. In the days of your dad, it wound up being as high as 35%. Talk about how we can get back to there. Here, Ross, you, Evan, and thank you. Well, I'm gonna just say something. I'm not sure exactly. If I had all the answers, I probably wouldn't be here. But I think it's important to say that in, what happens if we don't have a union? What happens if things decline? And the 99%, 1%, it's more like 0.5%, 99.5% now. At one point, there's gonna be an explosion of real people who can't make it. They're working their butts off, and they can't make it. Now, what's gonna happen if there's not a union option to go, remember, Roosevelt, he wasn't a great fan of unions, but he and the upper classes of the 30s looked around and said, my God, if something doesn't happen, there could be socialism, communism. Labor unions were, that was a much easier option for people to take. And so what will happen if a demagogue comes along? Chooses to change, so I worry when we weaken unions. Unions help the fabric, they're democratic, and that's real important. Ross? Well, I'd say the changes, the Wagner Act gave a huge boost to the labor movement. Actually, the government encouraged collective bargaining, and the labor leaders were able to, John L. Lewis and leaders were able to say, the president wants you to organize, and it made a huge difference to people back then. But unions gave up a lot of tools over the years. They gave up the sit-down strike, as I said, that they had, or it was taken away from them by the courts. In 1947, the Taft-Hartley Act took away secondary boycotts and imposed huge fines on unions if they violated their contracts. There's nothing on the other side of the ledger to punish a company for its wrongdoing. The laws have been shifting. The Landrum-Griffin Act took away the last power of hot cargo agreements. The law has steadily, ever since the Wagner Act, worked more and more against unions, and I'd say a minimal requirement to restore the kind of power that unions had in the past is to change those laws and to give back the kinds of tools, the economic weapons that they're messy, they can be ugly strikes, no one likes to see a strike, but that was how workers got their power. That's how they got to put the squeeze on management to raise wages, and they just can't do it now. Yeah, I mean it takes, it takes. Even when the Democrats... Well, let me just say something. I come from Michigan, I've seen a lot of the things I've tried to work for in my life, being torn apart by the kind of legislature we've got there and the kind of governor we've got. Now, I watched, and I was in the streets when right to work legislation passed a couple of years ago, two years ago. And I gotta tell ya, you gotta hand it to people. They come up with this concept, right to work. It's not right to work. I mean, come on. You know, the idea of fairness, the right wing tries to talk about the fairness issue. Well, of course somebody should be allowed to join a union or not join a union. Well, first of all, that's there right now. Secondly, what they don't talk about is that if someone chooses not to be part of a union, they still get the same benefits negotiated by the union. That's not fair. That's not right. That's not the American way. But most people don't understand it. And I'll be honest, I think labor has missed the boat in terms of the educating people on this issue. It's just not, I mean, people, if they get it, can step back and say, oh, wait a second, there's another side. They're not getting the other side. Yeah, I agree with you, Bob. I've always felt that I used to say that in my letters to the constituent, which is if somebody wants to opt out of a union, they should not get the benefits of union education. This idea that I can do it myself, I hear that all the time, particularly young people sitting around bars, talking about I don't need social security, I can invest some money myself. They're usually the first ones in the poor house. There you go. I don't know how to best. So I do think you're right about the laws and changing them. Two things, first, if I had an answer to that, I'd join the A.F. of the L and I'd be president of the A.F. I'm not sure I can do a very good job, but I don't have the answer to that. I haven't thought of two things. One, I think the public employee unions, which are the growth area, there needs to be better collaboration between the private sector unions and the public employee. And their interests are really diverging in serious ways. And it's been very difficult in Michigan to listen to the manufacturing unions and the building trades having to take big concessions and willing to do it during hard budgetary times. And the public employee unions are abusing to do it. And in Michigan, in some respects, you know the labor movement cooked its own goose on right to work. That doesn't make what Rick Snyder did right. Two wrongs don't make a right. But it was an issue and this is serious. But it all gets back to what you saw, which is we have a crying need for civic learning in this country. Part of that would be the labor movement, part of it would be our history. But I don't think, you know, when you talk, I don't think that government, civics, current affairs, I don't, history, I don't think these are, everybody's talking about STEM curriculum. I don't think that there's serious civic learning going on. I happen to be vice president of National Archives. We have a big thing tonight. My co-vice president, Koki Roberts, Ken Burns, Michael Beschloss, I hate name droppers, but. But our belief with the archives, because it's more than archives, it's a museum, is there really has to be a whole new initiative in this country to explain who we are, how we got here, what made it happen, what's unique about it, what's not. I think about a lot having served in Canada is that's a similar but different country that I think takes a more enlightened view about a sense of community. I do. They don't have as strong a sense of nation that I might have, but they do have a very strong sense of community. Anyway, that's my thing about it is teaching and learning and education, we have to do that. That's why your book is good. I hope more people buy it and read it. So do I. All right, and on that note, I'm gonna thank you all for coming and we'll wrap up this very entertaining session. Thank you very much. Thank you.