Some sixteen hundred people were present, and I made a short speech.
IV
A few days later David and his wife drove us down to Atlantic City, where the sixty-five hundred delegates of the United Automobile Workers throughout the world were having a week’s assembly. I had never met either Walter Reuther or his younger brother, Victor, and this was a pleasant occasion for both me and my family. Present also was Michael Angelo Musmanno, who as a young lawyer had plunged into a last-hour effort to save the lives of Sacco and Vanzetti. A wonderfully kindhearted and exuberant person, now close to the seventies, he has become a judge of the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania. When I asked him how this miracle had come about, he answered with a smile: “It is an elective office.”
On a Sunday evening we found ourselves confronting the sixty-five hundred cheering delegates, many of whom no doubt had read Flivver King. It was a dinner affair, and I found myself seated between my wife and Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt, whom I had not seen since a visit to the White House in 1935, just after the EPIC campaign. There was plenty of time for conversation, especially since I had had my rice-and-fruit meal an hour or so earlier.
Walter Reuther presented to me the Social Justice Award of the United Automobile Workers—an ebony plaque that carries this citation:
With admiration and affection and in thankful appreciation for the great moral courage and social conscience that motivated your writings as you exposed the inhuman exploitation of labor in American industrial jungles. Your life and your work have contributed immeasurably to the extension of the frontiers of Social Justice. May 1962.
In my speech of acceptance I told how I had made a socialist, or a near-socialist, out of Henry Ford’s wife; and how, when he saw that he could not win the strike, he made all his plans to close up his plants—and was only deterred from it at the last moment by his wife’s announcement that if he carried out this evil purpose she would leave him. The story was new to those delegates, and I will not attempt to describe the enthusiasm with which they received it.
Mrs. Roosevelt also gave one of her warm-hearted talks, and so it was a worthy occasion to those labor men and their wives. I imagined that newspaper readers might also be interested in it, but I examined the New York morning and afternoon papers and discovered that they had nothing whatever to say about the affair. I am used to newspaper silence about my doings, but I had really thought they would have something to say about the eloquence of Eleanor Roosevelt, and of the welcome she had received from that vast throng. But not one word in the Monday morning and afternoon papers! I paid a call on the labor editor of the New York Times, and he was cordial—he took me about and introduced me to several other editors—but he had nothing to say about the paper’s failure to say anything about the UAW assemblage.
The award from the UAW included a check for a thousand dollars. I had written Walter that I would use the money to put a copy of Flivver King in the libraries of all the branches of the union throughout the world. In Atlantic City Victor Reuther told me that they planned to reissue Flivver King themselves and make it available to all their members. So I shall use the money to put in the union libraries copies of this present book and of the memorial edition of Southern Belle.