Who was the most influential person who helped shape your politics to this day? [View all]

[NNN0LHI]

This is the one person who probably affected me the most. I was 15 when he died but after I got older I realized this was someone who had shaped my politics. I flew into the same airport in Michigan that he died at a few years after the crash to visit Black Lake, Michigan. Do you know what the reason was that Reuther wanted the UAW Black Lake, Michigan recreational educational facility to be built? He wanted every one of our members to find out what it felt to live like a millionaire for two weeks. And it was exactly that. Like a Five-Star hotel. Know why he wanted us all to find out what that felt like? Because he didn't want us to settle for what the wealthy wanted us to settle for. Basically what we call a living wage today. He wanted us to understand that we deserved more than that. A lot more than that. Do you think the wealthy wanted us all to realize this? Read that last paragraph and think about that question.

Don

---------------------------------------------------------------------------

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Reuther

Walter Reuther

Walter Philip Reuther (September 1, 1907 – May 9, 1970) was an American labor union leader, who made the United Automobile Workers a major force not only in the auto industry but also in the Democratic Party in the mid 20th century. He was a socialist in the early 1930s becoming a leading liberal and supporter of the New Deal coalition.

Reuther was a Socialist Party member; he may have paid dues to the Communist Party for some months in 1935-36; he has been accused of attending a Communist Party planning meeting as late as February 1939. Reuther cooperated with the Communists in the later 1930s; this was the period of the Popular Front, and they agreed with him on internal issues of the UAW; but his associations were with anti-Stalinist Socialists.

Reuther remained active in the Socialist Party and in 1937 failed in his attempt to be elected to the Detroit Common Council. However, impressed by the efforts by President Franklin D. Roosevelt to tackle inequality, he eventually joined the Democratic Party.

On May 9, 1970, Reuther, his wife May, architect Oscar Stonorov, and also a bodyguard, the pilot and co-pilot were killed when their chartered Lear-Jet crashed in flames at 9:33 P.M. Michigan time. The plane, arriving from Detroit in rain and fog, was on final approach to the Pellston, Michigan, airstrip near the union's recreational and educational facility at Black Lake, Michigan.

In October 1968, a year and a half before the fatal crash, Reuther and his brother Victor were almost killed in a small private plane as it approached Dulles airport. Both incidents are amazingly similar; the altimeter in the fatal crash was believed to have malfunctioned. When Victor Reuther was interviewed many years after the fatal crash he said "I and other family members are convinced that both the fatal crash and the near fatal one in 1968 were not accidental." The FBI still refuses to turn over nearly 200 pages of documents pertaining to Walter Reuther's death, and correspondence between field offices and J. Edgar Hoover.