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By Root 2032 0

in the words of CIO founder John L. Lewis—and the sit-down strike proved an effective organizing weapon. By seizing control of one plant that made a crucial part, striking workers could paralyze an entire company. In the case of General Motors, that plant was at Flint, Michigan. In 1937, General Motors was the world’s largest manufacturing corporation. With more than a quarter of a million employees, it produced half of all cars made in America. Yet the only set of dies for every GM model was on the floor at Flint. When workers there laid down their tools and refused to leave the plant, General Motors production slowed to a trickle. A company that built 50,000 cars in December 1936 produced only 125 during the first week of February 1937.12

Roosevelt was as surprised as anyone but refused to use force against the strikers. As he told Frances Perkins, “Well, it is illegal, but what law are they breaking? The law of trespass, and that is about the only law that could be invoked. And what do you do when a man trespasses on your property? You can order him off. You can get the sheriff to order him off.… But shooting it out and killing a lot of people because they have violated the law of trespass somehow offends me. I just don’t see that as the answer. The punishment doesn’t fit the crime. Why can’t these fellows in General Motors meet with the committee of workers? Talk it out. It wouldn’t be so terrible.”13

Michigan governor Frank Murphy saw it the same way. “I’m not going down in history as Bloody Murphy,” he told a friend. “If I send soldiers in on the [strikers] there’d be no telling how many would be killed.”14 Murphy also authorized state relief payments for the families of the strikers. When Garner pressed FDR about Murphy’s refusal to take action, Roosevelt held his ground. “It was the hottest argument we ever had,” said Garner.15

With the strike in its seventh week and with both federal and state authorities unwilling to use force, General Motors looked for a way out. Chrysler and Ford had boosted production to take advantage of GM’s shutdown, and Walter Chrysler had stolen the march by recognizing the United Auto Workers. “Leave General Motors guessing again,” he told Labor secretary Perkins.16

At Frances Perkins’s suggestion, FDR picked up the phone and called William Knudsen, the president of General Motors. A call from the White House, she said, would give Knudsen an excuse if he wanted to settle. Roosevelt had never met Knudsen but agreed to the gambit and laid on the charm: “Is that you, Bill?” he asked.

“I know you’ve been through a lot, Bill, and I want to tell you that I feel sorry for you, but Miss Perkins has told me about the situation you are discussing and I have just called up to say I hope very much that you will go through with this and that your people will meet with the [workers’] committee.”17

With FDR’s encouragement General Motors recognized the United Auto Workers as labor’s bargaining agent at its sixty factories in fourteen states. Other issues remained unresolved, but the central point had been won: General Motors recognized the union.

Big Steel followed close behind. The United States Steel Corporation (“Big Steel”), with 220,000 employees, produced more steel annually than Germany, the world’s second largest steel-producing country.18 For fifty years U.S. Steel and its predecessors had militantly resisted unionization. The Homestead massacre of 1892, in which ten Pennsylvania steelworkers were killed, was emblematic of the violence that beset the industry. The lesson of the General Motors strike at Flint was not lost on Big Steel. Anxious to avoid a repeat, Myron C. Taylor, the firm’s chairman, and John L. Lewis quickly came to an agreement that not only recognized the steelworkers’ union but granted a pay hike, a forty-hour workweek, and time and a half for overtime.

Lewis and the leaders of organized labor assumed “Little Steel” (Bethlehem, Republic, Youngstown, and the small firms throughout the country) would fall into line. But Tom Girdler, the gruff, union-busting head of Republic