New book chronicles the historic Flint GM strike of 1936-1937

In the dark winter of 1936-1937 a group of Flint autoworkers decided they had enough of low wages, harassment and unsafe working conditions. The protesters occupied three GM plants for 44 days while Gov. Frank Murphy and President Franklin D. Roosevelt scrambled to bring the nation’s longest and largest sit-down strike to an end.

In his new book, “Midnight in Vehicle City,” author Edward McClelland details the courageous few who helped bring the middle-class prosperity to the United States.

“Midnight in Vehicle City” is only the second significant book on the momentous strike, McClelland writes not only about the roots of the strike and its day-by-day intricacies, but also dispels numerous myths about its participants.

The workers’ effort to shut the line down in an effort to secure better pay and conditions of work is often portrayed as a spur-of-the-moment decision. McClelland details how the sit-down strike was actually planned well in advance by a group who supported the burgeoning movement to recognize the United Auto Workers as the exclusive bargaining agent for the workers.

The author also provides a short history on the evolution of Flint from a town of carriage makers to the world’s largest producer of automobiles. The author writes that by the mid-’30s Flint had become a company town with three quarters of the workforce drawing a paycheck from GM or one of its suppliers.

With that power GM could pretty much determine conditions of employment and wages and workers could accept them, leave or be fired. The company knew they held all the cards and during the Depression there were hundreds of workers waiting in line for jobs.

McClelland is able to recreate the sit-down strike thanks to a vast collection of oral histories that were collected from workers and from the community groups that supported them during the strike.

The author said he did the vast majority of his research at the University of Michigan Flint campus and the Reuther Library at Wayne State University. He spent days reading the strike coverage in The Flint Journal.

“I spent a lot of time in Flint,” he said.

However, McClelland can trace the impetus for his book back to his hometown of Lansing, an auto city in its own right. Growing up, his father’s close friend Everett Ketchum, who was one of the sit-down workers, would join their family for dinner on Sundays.

“He was the exemplar of the workers who participated in the strike,” McClelland said.

Later, after his wife’s death Ketchum remarried and moved to Lansing where he continued his career at Oldsmobile. In Lansing, he became active in the community and, according to McClelland, a minor celebrity known anonymously as the “Flap Jack Shop’s Tooth Fairy.” McClelland writes how if Ketchum saw someone in desperate need of dental work, he would pay for it out of his savings. The author is a graduate of Lansing Sexton High School and his real last name is Kleine.

The book really shines when McClelland begins chronicling the actual strike. Organizers knew that the newly elected Democratic Gov. Frank Murphy would not evict the workers, despite GM’s best efforts to create political and legal pressure.

Unlike previous governors, organizers were banking that Murphy would use his close ties with President Roosevelt to force GM to the bargaining table.

When the sit-down strike became violent — with Flint Police trying to forcibly evict the workers — Gov. Murphy would order the National Guard to Flint, but only as peacekeepers.

“Politically, Murphy knew where his bread was buttered,” McClelland said.

Ultimately, McClelland said former Gov. Frank Fitzgerald, who Murphy had previously defeated, beat Murphy in the following election likely because of his role in the sit-down strike.

McClelland goes out of his way not to solely focus on the larger-than-life actors in the strike, such as GM executives Alfred P. Sloan Jr. and William S. Knudsen, United Mine Workers president John L. Lewis and Frances Perkins, the Reuther Brothers and Secretary of Labor, but also on individuals like Wyndham Mortimer, a Cleveland auto worker and first vice-president of the newly formed UAW.

In the chapter, “A Stranger in Town,” McClelland rises to the level of the early proletariat writers in describing the lonely and dangerous life of Wyndham, a union organizer who has to be on a continuous watch for company-funded Pinkerton police while organizing in Flint.

Readers will also enjoy the chronicling of the day-to-day life of strikers and how they spent their idle time playing cards, exercising and fortifying the plants while holding out against GM. Of special interest is the community effort of the Women’s Emergency Brigade and the UAW Women’s Auxiliary, who tirelessly picketed the plants and provided food, water and warm clothing for the workers.

At one time, 70,000 autoworkers in Flint and 500,000 nationwide could trace their middle-class life style to the strike. Today, there are an estimated 6,500 autoworkers in Flint and an estimated 50,000 nationwide.