Midnight in Vehicle City: General Motors, Flint, and the Strike That Created the Middle Class

by Edward McClelland

Overview

Winner of the 2021 Midland Authors Book Award in History

In a time of great inequality and a gutted middle class, the dramatic story of “the strike heard around the world” is a testament to what workers can gain when they stand up for their rights.

The tumultuous Flint sit-down strike of 1936-1937 was the birth of the United Auto Workers, which set the standard for wages in every industry. Midnight in Vehicle City tells the gripping story of how workers defeated General Motors, the largest industrial corporation in the world. Their victory ushered in the golden age of the American middle class and created a new kind of America, one in which every worker had a right to a share of the company’s wealth. The causes for which the strikers sat down—collective bargaining, secure retirement, better wages—enjoyed a half century of success. But now, the middle class is disappearing and economic inequality is at its highest since before the New Deal.

Journalist and historian Edward McClelland brings the action-packed events of the strike back to life—through the voices of those who lived it. In vivid play-by-plays, McClelland narrates the dramatic scenes including of the takeovers of GM plants; violent showdowns between picketers and the police; Michigan governor Frank Murphy’s activation of the National Guard; the actions of the militaristic Women’s Emergency Brigade who carried billy clubs and vowed to protect strikers from police; and tense negotiations between labor leader John L. Lewis, GM chairman Alfred P. Sloan, and labor secretary Frances Perkins.

The epic tale of the strike and its lasting legacy shows why the middle class is one of the greatest inventions of the 20th century and will guide our understanding of what we will lose if we don’t revive it.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780807055489
Publisher:	Beacon Press
Publication date:	02/01/2022
Pages:	232
Sales rank:	1,004,876
Product dimensions:	5.10(w) x 8.10(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Edward McClelland is a journalist, a historian, and an author born and raised in Lansing, Michigan. His work has been published in numerous places, including the New York Times, Washington Post, and the Chicago Reader, and on Salon and Slate. He is the author of several books, including Young Mr. Obama: Chicago and the Making of a Black President, Nothin’ but Blue Skies: The Heyday, Hard Times and Hopes of America’s Industrial Heartland, and How to Speak Midwestern. Connect with him online at edwardmcclelland.com and @TedMcClelland on Twitter.

Table of Contents

INTRODUCTION
Vehicle City

CHAPTER 1
A Stranger in Town

CHAPTER 2
The Perkins Boys

CHAPTER 3
“This Is Where the Fight Begins”

CHAPTER 4
The Siege

CHAPTER 5
The Battle of the Running Bulls

CHAPTER 6
The Women’s Emergency Brigade

CHAPTER 7
“General Motors Has Double-Crossed Us!”

CHAPTER 8
Miss Perkins and Mr. Sloan

CHAPTER 9
Chevy Four

CHAPTER 10
Murphy’s Law

CHAPTER 11
Evacuation Day

Epilogue
Acknowledgments
A Note on Sources
Notes
Photo Credits
Index

Editorial Reviews

11/02/2020

Journalist McClelland (Folktales and Legends of the Middle West) delivers a detailed account of the 1936–1937 General Motors strike in Flint, Mich. During the Great Depression, General Motors cut wages, slashed jobs, and sped up the pace of work. In 1936, the newly-formed United Auto Workers of America labor union sent organizers to Flint, where a membership drive and temporary work stoppages to protest unjust firings culminated in a sit-down strike at the Fisher One auto body plant. The strike soon spread to other plants, and tempers ran so high that the National Guard was dispatched to keep the peace between strikers and Flint police. The governor of Michigan and President Franklin Roosevelt got involved, and GM and the UAWA eventually came to terms over improved working conditions, amnesty for strikers, and a collective bargaining agreement. McClelland makes excellent use of primary sources to spotlight local organizations including the Women’s Emergency Brigade, which evolved over the course of the strike from “a homemakers’ sodality to a quasi-military force,” but underdevelops his claims about the strike’s broader impact. Still, students of labor history will relish this enthusiastic chronicle of a victory for ordinary workers. (Feb.)

Publishers Weekly

[A] fascinating labor struggle. Readers interested in American labor and social history will find McClelland’s engagingly written, informative work a key to understanding the voices and roles of those who advocated for better working conditions for all working-class people.”
—Booklist

“A spirited history of labor’s triumph.”
—Kirkus Review

“Students of labor history will relish this enthusiastic chronicle of a victory for ordinary workers.”
—Publishers Weekly

“In Midnight in Vehicle City, Edward McClelland draws out such lessons from the past and offers them up to workers fighting new battles in long conflict.”
—Chicago Review of Books

“[McClelland’s] chronicle of the strike is compelling.”
—The Wall Street Journal

“Brings a fresh look to the seminal moment in Flint’s contribution to American history.”
—East Village Magazine

“Remarkably timely . . . Reads like a story of master tacticians fighting a battle.”
—Christian Science Monitor

“McClelland writes with grace and insight about one of the most consequential, world-shaking labor strikes of all time. What a gift! Midnight in Vehicle City gives us both precision and power in the telling of an astonishing story with so much to teach those of us today who are wrestling with inequality and exploitation in the twenty-first century.”
—Anna Clark, author of The Poisoned City: Flint’s Water and the American Urban Tragedy

“Midnight in Vehicle City captures the Flint of today through the captivating story of the city’s past. McClelland reveals the toughness, determination, and even recklessness that fueled autoworkers and their families in 1936 as they took on a corporate giant, the military, and an unsympathetic press. If you ever wonder why current Flint residents haven’t given up, this book is an engaging reminder that fighting seemingly unwinnable battles is part of the city’s DNA.”
—Gordon Young, author of Teardown: Memoir of a Vanishing City

“Lively and dramatic . . . from the shop floor to kitchen tables to furtively organized midnight meetings, McClelland paints wonderfully resonant portraits of individual workers . . . a book not just for students but also Walmart clerks, Amazon warehouse workers, and McDonald’s ‘associates,’ who will be inspired as they make their own history.”
—Nelson Lichtenstein, author of State of the Union: A Century of American Labor

“McClelland’s lively and lucid narrative of this central event in labor history is a timely reminder that when workers act together they can bring about significant change—not just for themselves but for society at large.”
—Timothy Noah, author of The Great Divergence: America’s Growing Inequality Crisis and What We Can Do About It

“The battles were fought bitterly, often viciously, with rocks and bottles, blackjacks and hammers, against the brick-and-soot backdrop of America’s industrial cities in the 1930s. The war was for the dignity of the American worker; the tactic was the strike. . . . A vivid, granular drama rich with characters, scenes, and the soulful gravity of the worker’s fight for decency.”
—David Giffels, author of Barnstorming Ohio: To Understand America

From the Publisher

01/01/2021

The sit-down strike that swept through General Motors plants in Flint, MI, in 1936 was one of the landmark events in the American labor movement. Journalist McClelland provides a step-by-step account of this strike and the negotiations that ultimately led to the establishment of collective bargaining rights for the United Auto Workers. Drawing from accounts of conditions in the plants before and during the strike, McClelland provides vivid depictions of the experiences of workers contrasted with a detailed look at the negotiations between the union, the company executives, and state and federal government officials. While McClelland briefly discusses labor struggles in other industries, the focus here is kept tightly on the auto industry and the Flint strike. Some of the most effective parts of the book are the portraits of key figures in the strike, including Michigan Governor Frank Murphy; Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins; and Genora Johnson, who organized the wives of striking workers. VERDICT McClelland's engaging, readable account is a solid introduction to the rise of the labor movement in the 1930s. Recommend for readers interested in labor history and especially for those looking for a reminder of the power that workers can have when they negotiate collectively.—Nicholas Graham, Univ. of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

Library Journal

2020-12-08
An account of an unprecedented 1930s strike that tested the power of factory workers.

In 1908, Buick, Oldsmobile, Pontiac, Cadillac, and Chevrolet merged to become General Motors, making Flint, Michigan, the nation’s automobile capital. Now better known for its scandalous water crisis, Flint in the 1930s became famous as the birthplace of the United Auto Workers, which mounted a 1936 sit-down strike that ended in workers’ success. Drawing on newspaper reports, memoirs, and oral histories of more than 100 strikers, McClelland uses present-tense narration to create a sense of immediacy and tension among workers locked in their plant, the Flint community in upheaval, and the protracted process of frustrating negotiations. Efforts to unionize had repeatedly failed, not least because GM “spent nearly $1 million on Pinkerton spies to infiltrate the workforce and report on union activity.” The advent of the steel-body car, which led to the speedup of the assembly line, intensified workers’ discontent; finally, they agreed to a sit-down strike, “more effective than walking out of a plant because if workers abandon their machinery, the bosses can hire scabs to get it running again.” McClelland creates lively portraits of the many players in his well-populated history: among them, GM chairman Alfred P. Sloan (later benefactor of the grant-giving Sloan Foundation and the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center), who was “by his own admission, a ‘narrow man’ with no interests whatsoever outside the business world”; Franklin Roosevelt’s feisty labor secretary, Frances Perkins; and Michigan governor Frank Murphy, an advocate for a strong labor movement to rein in the profit system. A champion of unions, McClelland attributes their successes to the rise of the now-beleaguered middle class and urges a renewal of union activity. “A sit-down strike is not an obsolete tactic,” he writes. “The blueprint for better working conditions, and for a revival of the middle class, is in this book.”

A spirited history of labor's triumph.

Kirkus Reviews