Before
the blows began to rain: Walter Reuther (hand in pocket) and Richard
Frankensteen (to Reuther’s left). Photo: James Kilpatrick of the Detroit News, Wikimedia Commons
In 1937, Walter Reuther and his United Autoworkers Union had brought
General Motors and Chrysler to their knees by staging massive sit-down
strikes in pursuit of higher pay, shorter hours and other improvements
in workers’ lives. But when Reuther and the UAW set their sights on the
Ford Motor Company’s River Rouge complex in Dearborn, Michigan, Henry
Ford made it clear that he’d never give in to the union.
On the morning of May 26, 1937,
Detroit News photographer
James “Scotty” Kilpatrick was among a crowd waiting for the shift change
at River Rouge, which employed 90,000 workers. About 2 p.m. that May
26, Reuther arrived at the Miller Road Overpass at Gate 4 with an
entourage of clergymen, representatives from the Senate Committee on
Civil Liberties and dozens of women from UAW Local 174, where Reuther
was president. The woman wore green berets and carried leaflets reading,
“Unionism, not Fordism,” which they intended to hand out to departing
workers. At the direction of “Scotty” Kilpatrick, Reuther posed for
photographs with UAW organizational director Richard Frankensteen and a
few other organizers atop the overpass—public property—with the Ford
Motor Company sign in the background.
Then
Harry Bennett
showed up with his entourage. Bennett, one of Henry Ford’s right-hand
men, led the notorious Ford Service Department, a private police force
composed of ex-convicts, ex-athletes, ex-cops and gang members.
“You will have to get off here,” one of Bennett’s men told the unionists.
“We’re not doing anything,” Reuther replied.
Frankensteen
(with his jacket pulled over his head) said members of the Ford Service
Department gave him “the worst licking I’ve ever taken.” Photo: James
Kilpatrick, Detroit News, Wikimedia Commons
Like that, what would become infamous as the Battle of the Overpass
was on. Forty of Bennett’s men charged the union organizers. Kilpatrick
called out a warning, but the security men pounced, beating the union
leaders while reporters and clergy looked on. Kilpatrick and the other
photographers began snapping away. Reporters accompanying them took
notes on what they were seeing.
Reuther was kicked, stomped, lifted into the air, thrown to the
ground repeatedly, and tossed down two flights of stairs. Frankensteen,
a 30-year-old, hulking former football player, go it worse because he
tried to fight back. Bennett’s men swarmed him, pulled his jacket over
his head and beat him senseless.
“
It was the worst licking I’ve ever taken,”
he later told reporters. “They bounced us down the concrete steps of
an overpass we had climbed. Then they would knock us down, stand us up,
and knock us down again.” Another union leader was tossed off the
overpass; his fall 30 feet to the pavement below broke his back. The
security men even roughed up some of the women.
The battle, such as it was, ended almost as suddenly as it had begun.
But then there was the matter of witnesses—especially the journalists
on the scene. Some of Bennett’s security men began to tear notebooks
from reporters’ hands. Others went after the photographers, confiscating
film and smashing cameras to the ground. They chased one fleeing
photographer for five miles, until he ducked into a police station for
safety.
Scotty Kilpatrick fled, too—and made it to his car in just enough
time to hide the glass-plate negatives from his Speed Graphic under the
back seat. When some Bennett men stopped him and demanded that he
surrender his negatives, he handed them unexposed plates.
Once Reuther, Frankensteen and witnesses began to tell reporters what
they had seen in front of the Ford plant, Harry Bennett issued a
statement. “The affair was deliberately provoked by union officials,” it
said. “They feel, with or without justification, the [Senator] La
Follette Civil Liberties Committee sympathizes with their aims and they
simply wanted to trump up a charge of Ford brutality that they could
take down to Washington and flaunt before the senatorial committee.
“I know definitely no Ford service men or plant police were involved
in any way in the fight,” Bennett continued. “As a matter of fact, the
service men had issued instructions the union people could come and
distribute their pamphlets at the gates so long as they didn’t interfere
with employees at work.” The unionists, he said, “were beaten by
regular Ford employees who were on their way to work on the afternoon
shift. The union men called them scabs and cursed and taunted them.”
Dearborn Police later said the Ford Service Department was “defending public property.”
Meanwhile, Scotty Kilpatrick developed his negatives, and other
photographers, after the event, captured on film the injuries to the
bloodied Reuther and Frankensteen. “If Mr. Ford thinks this will stop
us, he’s got another thing coming,” Frankensteen said. “We’ll go back
there with enough men to lick him at his own game.”
Ford security men harassed and beat women from the UAW auxiliary. Photo: James Kilpatrick, Detroit News, Wikimedia Commons.
Reuther was more composed: “Before the UAW gets through with Harry
Bennett and Ford’s Service Department, Dearborn will be a part of the
United States and the workers will be able to enjoy their constitutional
rights.”
Bennett did his best to put his version into news accounts of the
Battle of the Overpass, but once Kilpatrick’s photographs were
published, it was obvious that the beatings were far more violent than
Bennett had described. And they showed Ford security men surrounding and
beating UAW men and grabbing UAW women. In all, 16 unionists were
injured in the attack, including seven women. Reuther was pictured
bloodied and with a swollen skull, and Frankensteen was even worse—his
face cut and his shirt torn and bloodstained. Kilpatrick’s photographs
quickly turned public opinion toward the notion that the Ford Service
Department was a gang of hired thugs.
In a hearing before the National Labor Relations Board in 1937, the
Ford Motor Company
was called to defend itself from charges that the company was engaging
in unfair labor practices in violation of the 1935 Wagner Act, which
prohibited employers from interfering with workers’ efforts to organize
into unions. During the hearing, Ford workers testified that if their
superiors suspected them of showing interest in the UAW, Ford Service
Department men would pull them from the assembly lines and escort them
to the gate as they were fired on the spot, often without explanation.
The publicity from the Battle of the Overpass and the ensuing
labor-board hearing proved to be too much for Henry Ford. He had tried
to raise his workers’ pay soon after the incident in Dearborn, but his
efforts came too late, and ultimately, like Detroit’s other automotive
giants, he had no choice but to sign a contract with the UAW.
The power of Scotty Kilpatrick’s photographs eventually vaulted
Walter Reuther into national prominence as a labor leader and prompted
the administrators of the Pulitzer Prizes to institute an award for
photography. The first Pulitzer for photography would be awarded to
Milton Brooks of the
Detroit News in 1942—for his image of UAW strikers savagely beating a strikebreaker.
Sources
Articles:
“Union Acts to Prosecute Ford in Beating of Two Organizers,”
The Christian Science Monitor, May 27, 1937. “C.I.O. Leaders Slugged, Driven Off in Attempt to Spread Handbills,”
Washington Post, May 27, 1937. “Ford Men Beat and Rout Lewis Union Organizers,”
New York Times, May 27, 1937. “The Battle of the Overpass, at 75,” by Bryce Hoffman,
The Detroit News, May 24, 2012. “Ford Motor Company Chronology,” The Henry Ford, http://www.hfmgv.org/exhibits/fmc/battle.asp
Books: Nelson Lichtenstein,
Walter Reuther: The Most Dangerous Man in Detroit, Basic Books, 1995.
