A Moment in Family History

Last night, hubby and I started an audio book. We were looking for “something good” and came across:

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

by Edward McClelland (Author), Jeff Zinn (Narrator)

That sounds great! I thought. I have a complicated relationship with the cities of Detroit and Flint. I’m not “from” either one, but my family is. I know almost nothing of Detroit beyond Hudson’s (where, out of family tradition, I was registered when I got married, just like my mother and grandmother before me, although I’d never visited the original downtown store), the occasional all-family-on-board game at the original Tigers Stadium, and Sanders. I know almost nothing of Flint beyond the devastated neighborhood my mother and I cruised once looking for the corner where my great-great grandparents had once lived (the house was long gone of course). Posted signs read, “No standing or cruising.”

My Great-Great-Great Grandfather Joseph Schryer came to Flint from still-middle-of-the-wilderness Quebec. He started a farm, and his sons went to work in the sawmills. Flint was a giant sawmill town before it was an auto town. My family had worked in sawmills in Ontario, too, since shortly after the US Revolutionary War. Holy cow, we were Flint from Ago.

My Great-Great Grandfather Davison Schryer was a day laborer on the railroad going through Flint, and was killed in an accident on the job. His son, my Great Grandfather William Arthur, trimmed buggies in Flint. Apparently, Flint had a huge carriage industry. He later moved to Detroit and his second wife was the boarding house keeper’s daughter, my great-grandmother Emeline.

Their son, my Grandfather Francis William, was a tool and die maker.

I always knew that that was a source of pride in the family. That Frank, who died in 1961, was a skilled tradesworker. He finished his career in the auto trades as a superintendent at Allied #4, a tool and die shop, in Hillsdale.

What I had never put together was that my grandfather was apprenticed, and then working, before, during, and after the formation of the UAW. But he was not a member of the UAW. Skilled tradesworkers weren’t.

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

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. 

What was it like to be on the side of the fence that didn’t belong to the union? My mind ranged over the limited information I have about my great aunts and uncles. Were Frank’s brothers UAW? Were they skilled trades? Which of them didn’t work in the auto industry at all?

McClelland reprints letters from Wyndham Mortimer to auto workers in 1936, months before the sit-down strike, including this one:

Fellow worker: What does the future hold for you? Do you face the future unafraid? When your children come out of school, what are their prospects for the future? Do you think GM will be kinder to them than to you? Is the wife you promised to love, honor, and cherish, able to enjoy the good things in life she’s entitled to? And is she not as precious to you as the employer’s wife is to him? Why do you permit this intolerable discrimination against you and yours? Sign the enclosed card for membership in the United Automobile Workers CIO.

wyndham mortimer

My grandparents were courting at the time. Did Frank stop and think about what he wanted with the 16-year-old Elaine Jackson whom he had wooed by telling her, “I will know your grandchildren.” A more serious-minded expression of intent I have never heard in all my life.

Did my grandfather engage in labor fights over the family dinner table? Over Emeline’s Sunday china that I still have? Wyndham was a communist. Ah-hem. My grandfather voted for Nixon over Kennedy. Did my grandfather get that letter? Did his brothers, uncles, neighbors? What did they think of it? If you weren’t to be included in the membership, what was it like to go into the plant the day after those mimeographed letters hit the city’s mailboxes?

This book is bringing a critical moment home to me in a way that nothing, including growing up in the faded family shadows of Flint and Detroit, ever has.

Ahoy, Michigan!