Midnight in Automobile Metropolis: Common Motors, Flint, and the Strike That Created the Center Class

The tumultuous Flint sit-down strike of 1936-1937 was the delivery of the United Auto Staff, which set the usual for wages in each trade. Midnight in Automobile Metropolis tells the gripping story of how employees defeated Common Motors, the most important industrial company on the earth. Their victory ushered within the golden age of the American center class and created a brand new sort of America, one wherein each employee had a proper to a share of the corporate’s wealth. The causes for which the strikers sat down—collective bargaining, safe retirement, higher wages—loved a half century of success. However now, the center class is disappearing and financial inequality is at its highest since earlier than the New Deal.

Journalist and historian Edward McClelland brings the action-packed occasions of the strike again to life—by the voices of those that lived it. In vivid play-by-plays, McClelland narrates the dramatic scenes together with of the takeovers of GM vegetation; violent showdowns between picketers and the police; Michigan governor Frank Murphy’s activation of the Nationwide Guard; the actions of the militaristic Ladies’s Emergency Brigade who carried billy golf equipment and vowed to guard strikers from police; and tense negotiations between labor chief John L. Lewis, GM chairman Alfred P. Sloan, and labor secretary Frances Perkins.

The epic story of the strike and its lasting legacy exhibits why the center class is likely one of the best innovations of the twentieth century and can information our understanding of what we’ll lose if we don’t revive it.