Walter Reuther: The Most Dangerous Man in Detroit

Rating:
Summary: God of the Left
Review: Besides leaving behind a freeway named after him, Reuther is a modern Father of the Radical Left, and has left behind a legacy of Union corruption, crooked party politics, and collective brainwashing. A fascinating book, a fascinating man, and a heck of a story, it's ideologically incorrect in that it exalts Reuther toward legacy status, and it appeases those that believe in the power of government, and the collective mentality of the masses. It's all good and well, says the author, because unions and government usurpation and regulation are all glorious. Horrible mentality, but good writing and research. Reach your own judgements.

Rating:
Summary: If You're Alone, And You've Got The Shakes...
Review: Nelson Lichtenstein's meticulous book provides us with the Walter Reuther our times deserve, but Walter Reuther was no god. Those curious about Fredric Jameson's request that the translation of Adorno be the occasion for the forging of a powerful new Germanic sentence structure in English may already know something Jameson doesn't, namely that trace elements of the "48er" mentality brought by German republican-and-worse immigrants to the United States in the 19th century persisted on through the 20th century in certain "locales", including Reuther's Detroit. But although the legacy of German Idealism (not injected into American labor via recent teach-ins) is problematic in all its forms, Lichtenstein pays relatively little attention to Reuther's complicated dealings with the Communist Party, in line with the scruples of the postwar intellectual establishment. And this is really not forgivable, as Detroit was and to a great extent remains the capital of the principled reformist American left; including Marxists of various stripes, whose number Reuther perhaps deserves to be counted among in any number of analyses.
In other words, Walter Reuther deserves to be remembered as something better than Richard Rorty's hero and something less than, well...

Rating:
Summary: If You're Alone, And You've Got The Shakes...
Review: Nelson Lichtenstein's meticulous book provides us with the Walter Reuther our times deserve, but Walter Reuther was no god. Those curious about Fredric Jameson's request that the translation of Adorno be the occasion for the forging of a powerful new Germanic sentence structure in English may already know something Jameson doesn't, namely that trace elements of the "48er" mentality brought by German republican-and-worse immigrants to the United States in the 19th century persisted on through the 20th century in certain "locales", including Reuther's Detroit. But although the legacy of German Idealism (not injected into American labor via recent teach-ins) is problematic in all its forms, Lichtenstein pays relatively little attention to Reuther's complicated dealings with the Communist Party, in line with the scruples of the postwar intellectual establishment. And this is really not forgivable, as Detroit was and to a great extent remains the capital of the principled reformist American left; including Marxists of various stripes, whose number Reuther perhaps deserves to be counted among in any number of analyses.
In other words, Walter Reuther deserves to be remembered as something better than Richard Rorty's hero and something less than, well...