[Schlesinger is a prominent American historian and leading intellectual figure in liberal politics. He has twice been awarded the Pulitzer Prize: first for The Age of Jackson (1945) and then for A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House (1965). In the review below, he remarks favorably on The U.A.W. and Walter Reuther.]

The United Automobile Workers is one of the great and astonishing achievements of contemporary American life. Growing up in Detroit, that great, steaming swamp of a city, drawing its membership in great part from tense and embittered minorities, confronted by peculiarly rich and ruthless corporations, the U. A. W. has yet shown a reassuring degree of trade-union efficiency and of political sanity. Its top leadership, moreover, was for many years bumbling and mediocre. Yet the U. A. W. has not only survived Homer Martin and R. J. Thomas; it has not only beaten off a series of conspiratorial factions, from the KKK and the Black Legion to the Trotskyites and the Communist Party; but it has ended by becoming the great model for militant labor in America and by raising to leadership the most formidable new personality in the American labor movement.

The story of the U. A. W. is only partly the story of Walter Reuther; but the two stories are inseparable, and The UAW and Walter Reuther properly tells them together. The book opens with a trenchant picture of life and labor in Detroit. Then it deals concisely with the history of the U. A. W., a section ending with a chapter-long portrait of Reuther. The characterization is shrewd, sympathetic without being uncritical, and generally convincing. The authors feel that Reuther in his rise to power has slipped to a considerable extent into "the character mold of the American managerial type: the personality of neutral efficiency." It is this managerial drift, they suggest, rather than any dictatorial ambitions of the kind his enemies profess to see in him, which may come into conflict with the militant rank and file of the union. But Reuther, while abandoning his doctrinaire socialism, has not abandoned the social conscience which originally drove him into the Socialist Party; so that "his action proceeds from tensions generated by a clash between the demands of power and the demands of vision." He thus remains, they argue, an "unfinished personality," whose inner conflicts symbolize twentieth-century American experience.

The last part of the book surveys current problems of the U. A. W.—race relations, bureaucratization, political action. In their larger view of union problems the authors have been influenced by C. Wright Mills; and, within the U. A. W. context, by Emil Mazey. This at once inclines them toward a Socialist third party and invests them with a belief in the potentialities of independent trade-union action in politics which their own observations of the remorseless process of bureaucratization would seem to me to contradict. The trade union, I fear, is an inherently conservative institution; it is not the likely instrument of revolutionary change. But their own predilection does not prevent the authors from giving an altogether fair statement of the position of those who favor working within the major parties.

The UAW and Walter Reuther is a swift, incisive, and highly intelligent book in a field where writing is too often official or irresponsibly polemical. Mr. Howe is a brilliant young critic; Mr. Widick is a chief steward at the Chrysler plant; and their collaboration combines a high level of political and social insight with intimate practical familiarity with life in the orbit of the assembly line. I am sorry that they did not pay more attention to U. A. W. achievements in labor education; and they might well have looked at the men around Reuther—Don Montgomery is mentioned once, Paul Sifton not at all. But on the whole they do justice to the varied facets of the remarkable U. A. W. record. The book supplies hope not only about the future of trade unionism in America but also about the future of writing about trade unionism in America.