PRESIDENT OF THE CIO

Early Career.

Walter Reuther, long associated with the United Auto Workers (UAW), established his legitimacy in a May 1937 leaflet distribution outside the River Rouge plant at Ford where he and several others were physically assaulted and hospitalized. His commitment to the labor cause, combined with his organizing skills, made him a natural leader, although early in his career he was an avowed Socialist. By 1938, however, Reuther had abandoned the Socialist party; even so, his close connections with Communists opened him to allegations from the Dies Committee, predecessor to the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), that he was a Communist.

Anticommunism.

When World War II came, Reuther helped to isolate and expose the Communists in the UAW, showing that they supported "the brutal dictatorships, and wars of aggression of the totalitarian governments.… "He devised a plan...