“All the learned men with all their wisdom, with all of the legal niceties they can put together on the finest of parchment, cannot produce one ton of steel.”

— Walter Reuther

1940s, Address accepting the Presidency of the CIO (1952)
Just sit down on a doorstep with a peasant in a village of Northern India and take on the task of trying to explain to him why America, conceived in freedom and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal, a nation that can split the atom, that can make a pursuit ship go three times as fast as sound and yet, in this twentieth century, we can't live together in brotherhood and we continue to discriminate against Negroes. It will tax your ingenuity, and you will give them no answers. You can only give them excuses. And excuses are not good enough, if we are going to win the struggle of freedom in the world.
Source: Address accepting the Presidency of the Congress of Industrial Organizations, Atlantic City, New Jersey, December 4, 1952, as quoted in Walter P Reuther: Selected Papers (1961), by Henry M. Christman, p. 51

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Walter Reuther 25

Labor union leader 1907–1970

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