Books in Brief: The Brothers Reuther and the Story of the UAW

The Brothers Reuther and the Story of the UAW, by Victor G. Reuther (Houghton Mifflin, 523 pp., $16.95). Joining the Brothers Grimm in the realm of fantasy is this apologia for the consistently most powerful and successful union in America. Its author is the survivor of the fraternal triumvirate—Victor, Roy, and Walter—whose careers, for decades, were inseparable from the life of the United Auto Workers. Although Victor represents the literary talent of the Reuther clan, his memoir starves for want of a good editor. The breaches of factual truth and sound writing are frequent and frustrating. (The most humorous is his reference to this journal as “National Republic.”) Reading this book is like being trapped in a time machine gone batty, as the author nonchalantly hopscotches through the years with no sense of chronology. To read Mr. Reuther, one would think that there was no such thing as intelligent and principled opposition to some of the excesses of the labor movement: indeed, one would think that there have been no such excesses. His treatment of the resisters of that movement is so brutal as to make the antiGoldwater commercials of 1964 appear to be paragons of truthful integrity. The book’s sole virtue lies in its description of the tightly knit Reuther family, and in the glimpses it gives us of the closeness in which that family sought refuge during its myriad troubles, such as the senseless shootings of Walter and Victor in the late 1940s. Basically, however, Reuther takes too long to say too little, too thoughtlessly and too predictably.