American Vanguard: The United Auto Workers during the Reuther Years, 1935-1970

American Vanguard: The United Auto Workers during the Reuther Years, 1935-1970. By John Barnard. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2004. xiv + 607 pp. Index, notes, photographs. Cloth, $34.95. ISBN: 0-814-32947-0.

The United Automobile Workers (UAW) once had a social weight that no union can match today. Boasting an enrollment of million and a half members employed in an industry that was central to the mid-twentieth-century economy, the UAW helped set the pattern for labor relations throughout the manufacturing sector and beyond. The union's long-time president, Walter Reuther, received massive press coverage; he was the favorite unionist of liberals and an important figure …