The UAW can’t do that job anymore: at 650,000 members, it enrolls less than half the number that paid dues twenty-five years ago. Walter Reuther once called it the “vanguard in America,” but today, if there is a union that aspires to that role, it is the Service Employees International Union, which is organizing so many immigrant workers, shaking up the health-care industry, prodding the Democrats leftward, and mobilizing a new generation of radical youth. It’s hard to know because the UAW no longer casts an economic, political, or imaginative shadow across the nation. The UAW’s current president, Ron Gettelfinger, may or may not be a fine union leader. For people on the left this was the domestic equivalent of the old “Russian Question.” The fate of the UAW was too important to be left to trade unionists alone. Indeed, if you were a political person in the mid-twentieth-century United States, you had to have an opinion-hostile, prodding, disappointed, celebratory-about the UAW and its strategic goals. And when the Dissent editorial board sat around to discuss the future of the labor movement, its members were really talking about the future of the UAW and what its celebrated president might or might not do. Widick’s first book was The UAW and Walter Reuther. You’re stumped, right? But when this magazine began in the mid-1950s, every subscriber knew the answer to that question. Quick quiz: Who is the president of the United Auto Workers union? Today, not twenty-five or forty years ago.
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