Battle of the Overpass

The photographs were published in newspapers across the country the next morning, and they were the beginning of the end for Harry Bennett.

May twenty-sixth, nineteen thirty-seven. Walter Reuther and three other United Auto Workers organizers, Richard Frankensteen, Robert Kanter, and J. J. Kennedy, stood on the Miller Road overpass outside the River Rouge plant to hand out union leaflets to workers arriving for the afternoon shift. They had obtained a permit from the city of Dearborn. They were standing on public property. A photographer from the Detroit News was there. A group of men in plain clothes, employees of Harry Bennett's Ford Service Department, approached them.

What followed was documented in photographs that remain among the most significant images in American labor history. The Service Department men attacked Reuther and Frankensteen, knocked them down, and beat them on the open overpass while the press photographer took pictures. The men were thrown down the stairs. Women distributing leaflets nearby were also attacked. The beating was methodical and unhurried. The men doing it were not afraid of witnesses.

Harry Bennett later claimed the attack was the spontaneous reaction of loyal Ford workers offended by union organizers. The photographs showed Ford men identified by witnesses who worked inside the plant. Bennett himself arrived at the scene after the beating was largely complete.

The images ran on front pages from New York to Chicago. Public sympathy shifted overnight. The National Labor Relations Board subsequently found Ford guilty of unfair labor practices. Four years later, after a plant-wide strike at River Rouge in April nineteen forty-one, Ford signed a union contract, the last of the Big Three automakers to do so. The contract gave the United Auto Workers full recognition and dues checkoff. It was one of the most consequential labor agreements in American history.

Walter Reuther became president of the United Auto Workers in nineteen forty-six. He held that office until his death in a plane crash in nineteen seventy. He was sixty-two years old.