A labor walk in Wheeling

Labor History Today

Walter Reuther’s name is forever linked to Detroit, Michigan, where he and his brother Victor built the United Automobile Workers -- the UAW -- into one of the largest and most progressive labor unions in American history. In Wheeling, West Virginia, where he was born on September 1, 1907, Reuther is a hometown boy who made good.
Each year for the last eight years, the Wheeling Academy of Law and Science Foundation (WALS) has organized the Reuther-Pollack Labor History Symposium on Labor Day weekend. The annual event also celebrates the life and work of local stogie maker -- and union supporter -- Augustus Pollack.
LHT producers Chris Garlock and Patrick Dixon drove out to Wheeling last Friday to cover the symposium, which included presentations by “Shift Happens” author J. Albert Mann, labor journalist Hamilton Nolan, West Virginia Mine Wars Museum co-founder Lou Martin and the Pittsburgh Labor Choir. We’ll be sharing audio from those presentations in upcoming shows.
West Virginia historian Hal Gorby led a walking tour on Saturday to statues of both Reuther and Pollack in a park along the Ohio River in downtown Wheeling. The noontime walk was interrupted by an intense but thankfully brief mountain thunderstorm, so you’ll hear the rain and thunder in the background as we took shelter and the intrepid Dr. Gorby continued his local history talk beneath his oversized umbrella.
On this week’s Labor History in Two: the year was 1921. On that day the “Battle of Blair Mountain” raged in Logan County, West Virginia.

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Labor History Today is produced by the Labor Heritage Foundation and the Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor.

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