HOUSTON — Of all the people associated with the first Earth Day on April 22, 1970, the contributions of former UAW leader Walter Reuther may be among the most forgotten.
That’s according to Perrysburg native and nationally known historian Douglas Brinkley, who told America’s largest group of environmental writers here recently that the environmental movement in general and specifically that within the Great Lakes region owes a lot to Mr. Reuther, the UAW’s fourth president.
“Walter Reuther of the United Auto Workers was the No. 1 environmentalist in America,” Mr. Brinkley said April 3 at the Houston Arboretum & Nature Center during the final day of the national Society of Environmental Journalists conference.
Though perhaps best known as a fierce campaigner for worker safety, civil rights, dignity, affordable health care, and pay scales designed to help union workers and their families have a middle-class living, Mr. Reuther also sought a clean environment for his members to enjoy fishing, hunting, hiking, boating, and other outdoor recreation, Mr. Brinkley said.
Mr. Reuther was “at the heart” of efforts to stop large corporations from fouling the Great Lakes and public land in the 1960s, he said.
“Walter Reuther was a big force for the environment,” Mr. Brinkley said. “So if you're asking what's missing now on the climate and environmental issue, it's this: ‘Where's labor?’ Who from labor is leading on the environment? Where’s the Walter Reuther of today?”
Bruce Baumhower, president of UAW Local 12 representing 16,000 workers and retirees in the Toledo area, said he wasn’t all that familiar with Mr. Reuther’s environmental efforts himself, but was impressed to learn about them given his own interest in the subject.
“I feel passionate about [the environment],” Mr. Baumhower said. “When we endorse candidates, the environment is one of the issues we discuss, and obviously health and safety too. It is part of our political agenda. I sometimes think we should be more active or more aggressive in our lobbying efforts toward the environment.”
Mr. Reuther was UAW president from 1946 until his death in a plane crash near Pellston, Mich. on May 9, 1970, a little more than two weeks after the first Earth Day. He survived two assassination attempts: one in 1938 and another in 1948.
In 1965, at a major water conference in Detroit, Mr. Reuther called for a mass mobilization of citizens for “a popular crusade not only for clean water, but also for cleaning up the atmosphere, the highways, the junkyards, and the slums and for creating a total living environment worthy of free men," according to an article in Environmental History, a journal published by University of Chicago Press.
In 1968, while speaking at the annual conference of the Water Pollution Control Federation, Mr. Reuther said he feared America could become “the first civilization in the history of man that will have suffocated and been strangled in the waste of its material affluence — compounded by social indifference and social neglect."
According to the University of Michigan history department, the UAW — under Mr. Reuther’s leadership — stated at a congressional hearing that "no one has the right to pollute our environment" and called the deterioration of natural resources “a national disgrace."
Mr. Reuther campaigned for less-polluting vehicle emissions in the 1960s, and endorsed the first Earth Day demonstrations in 1970, as well as a campaign with the Urban Environmental Conference that focused on environmental justice in polluted inner-city areas and hazardous workplaces.
Gavin Strassel, UAW archivist at Wayne State University’s Walter P. Reuther Library, said Mr. Reuther’s love of the outdoors stemmed from his belief in equity and fairness.
“He didn't see that as something that should be enjoyed by a select few. He wanted that to be accessible to everybody,” Mr. Strassel said.
Mr. Reuther didn’t hesitate to use the UAW’s influence on the environment and other issues, either.
“He realized the dangers of letting this problem get worse and that everyone would suffer if we let the environment deteriorate more,” Mr. Strassel said. “He’s a special person in American history.”
According to Grist magazine, Mr. Reuther made the first donation to support that first Earth Day. He wrote a check for $2,000.
The same article quoted Denis Hayes, the first Earth Day’s chief national coordinator, as saying the UAW was by far the largest contributor and the event likely would have flopped without the union’s help. Mr. Hayes said the UAW, under Mr. Reuther’s leadership, gave Earth Day “instant credibility.”
Today, there’s “no question” the Great Lakes region is Ground Zero for a lot of scientific research used around the world for improved water, land, and air quality, Mr. Brinkley said.
But the earliest efforts to restore the Great Lakes weren’t focused on cancer-causing polychlorinated biphenyls or other industrial pollutants. They began with concerns about the simple loss of coastal shoreline in the 1950s, especially along Indiana Dunes, Michigan’s Sleeping Bear Dunes, and Michigan’s Pictured Rocks area, he said.
“It became a big fight to save the Great Lakes because of the shorelines,” Mr. Brinkley said.
Poet Carl Sandburg became the face of the “Save the Dunes” movement in Indiana, an effort Mr. Brinkley said also drew a lot of support from two Democratic U.S. senators, Paul Douglas of Illinois and Phil Hart of Michigan.
“It got really fierce,” he said.
During the question-and-answer period of his talk, Mr. Brinkley retraced Lake Erie’s history from when scientists nearly declared it a dead body of water around 1970.
Even the beloved Dr. Seuss acknowledged the lake’s dire situation in the original printings of his classic children’s book about the environment, The Lorax. Ohio Sea Grant employees succeeded in getting the Lake Erie reference removed from subsequent editions.
Today, this “great incubator of fish,” as Mr. Brinkley called Lake Erie, isn’t a joke any longer. It’s Ohio’s biggest eco-tourism draw and the source of countless jobs, according to state officials.
In 2019, in a first-of-its-kind report, the Lake Erie region’s natural value was estimated at $443 billion, including $325 billion in water-related benefits. The 136-page report was done over a year by a Virginia-based consultant paid $75,000.
The fight to protect Lake Erie and the other four Great Lakes is a noble one, Mr. Brinkley said.
“I can't think of a region that needs more environmental activism than the Great Lakes,” he said.
Mr. Brinkley, a 1978 Perrysburg High School graduate, teaches at Rice University in Houston, has authored more than 20 history books, and is a frequent network television commentator.
He began his speech talking about his next book, Silent Spring Revolution: John F. Kennedy, Rachel Carson, Lyndon Johnson, and the Great Environmental Awakening, which is being published by HarperCollins and is due for release Nov. 15.
In it, he starts off with the birth of the atomic age and shows how the anti-nuclear movement was for many years connected to the environmental movement, Mr. Brinkley said.
He said the book also will show how former President Richard Nixon was “flying high” during the 1972 presidential election, easily in control of his race against Democratic challenger George McGovern but insecure because he was obsessed with cementing his legacy during his second term.
“Nixon thought he’d be the next Winston Churchill,” Mr. Brinkley said. “There obviously was no need to bug the DNC,” a reference to the Democratic National Committee headquarters espionage and Watergate scandal that ultimately forced Mr. Nixon to resign in disgrace.
Mr. Nixon presided over what’s become known as America’s most important environmental eras, including the years in which the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and other federal agencies protecting natural resources were created. He was there during the passage of the federal Clean Water Act, the Endangered Species Act, the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement with Canada, and other major laws.
He loathed Democrat Edmund Muskie, then a U.S. senator from Maine who was considered a darling of the environmental movement. He didn’t like how Democrats were claiming the environment as their issue, Mr. Brinkley said.
“Nixon was not interested in creating an EPA. He did it for political reasons,” he said.
Mr. Nixon became involved only because national sentiment for the environment grew following a major oil spill off the coast of Santa Barbara, Calif., in 1969. That same year, the Cuyahoga River had the most infamous of its several fires.
Those and other events prompted Earth Day, Mr. Brinkley said.
“Nixon wasn’t keen on it,” he said.
Ironically, Mr. Nixon’s respect for the environment grew after spending a week in the Seattle area with one of his key aides connected to the Watergate scandal, John Ehrlichman. Mr. Ehrlichman was counsel and assistant to Mr. Nixon for domestic affairs. Earlier in his career, he was a lawyer trying to prevent crass development.
“Nixon was blown away by how beautiful greater Seattle was by boat,” Mr. Brinkley said. “Nixon told Ehrlichman he didn't give a damn about the environment. Ehrlichman truly did.”
He said his upcoming book also will show how the civil rights movement dovetailed with the environmental movement because of how low-income populations bear the brunt of pollution.
The idea of making Black people sit at the back of a bus in the South wasn’t just because of ordinary segregation. It’s also because whites didn’t want to inhale diesel fumes coming in through the rear, Mr. Brinkley said.
Labor activist Cesar Chavez had an enduring impact with his fight to reduce pesticide exposure among farm workers in California and other states, he said.
“Look at what we’ve done to indigenous and Black neighborhoods,” Mr. Brinkley said, remarking that America has a long history of “using poor neighborhoods as dumping zones.”
First Published April 10, 2022, 1:30 p.m.
