Great Society: A New History by Amity Shlaes

Author:Amity Shlaes
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: 20th Century, History, History & Theory, Political Science, Public Policy, United States
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2019-11-19T03:00:00+00:00

9

Reuther and the Intruder

AUGUST 1968 TO DECEMBER 1968

* * *

Guns: 9.1% of GDP

Butter: 5.6% of GDP

Dow Jones Industrial Average: 894

* * *

We need not be concerned. We need only continue as always, making our improvements.

—Kiichiro Toyoda

On August 27, 1968, executives from the Japanese auto company Toyota took space at the New York Hilton to present to the American market a new car: the Corolla.1 Until recently Toyota had ranked only twenty-first among importers, and was known best in the States for a four-wheel-drive jeep derivative called the Land Cruiser. In 1965, the company had introduced a small car, the Corona, and now it was offering the even smaller Corolla. Toyota hoped to sell eighty thousand cars in the United States that year, or about one-fourth of what General Motors sold in a month.2 Improbably, the two-door Corolla sedan was only 153 inches long, more than two feet shorter than autos in the compact class, the Big Three’s smallest. The Corolla featured a four-cylinder engine that could hit 75 miles an hour, which meant Americans would find it possible. Most important, though, was the price: the Corolla retailed for $1,666, slightly below a comparable model, the Volkswagen Beetle. What mattered even more was that the Corolla’s $1,666 price stood well below that for the Rambler American (the update of George Romney’s old project), which sold for $1,946; or the Ford Falcon, priced at $2,252.

All news about the auto industry mattered to Walter Reuther. But in late August 1968, Reuther did not have time to give the arrival of one small car on the scene his attention. The week found the union leader at the Democratic National Convention, ensconced in a twenty-fifth-floor suite at the Sheraton Chicago on North Michigan Avenue.

What mattered for the moment was not the gap in price between an American auto and an auto from a minor importer. The gap that mattered was the sudden gap in the polls between Richard Nixon’s Republicans and Reuther’s own Democrats. The same day that the papers carried the news of the little Corolla, they reported that Nixon led Hubert Humphrey and Gene McCarthy in the polls by six points. That gap might only widen during the Democratic convention, especially as the party debated the Vietnam War.

It was a different convention from the one Reuther had imagined. Six months ago he might have pictured spending time with Robert Kennedy, helping Kennedy himself run for election—that was what Mildred Jeffrey, his colleague, would have liked. At the very least he might be helping Kennedy scout for 1972, or making phone calls from his suite to Martin Luther King. One year ago he would have imagined chatting about strategy with his brother Roy. Two years ago Reuther might have dreamed that the convention would be congratulating the trade union movement for its early recognition that successful democratic revolution was possible even behind the Iron Curtain. Three years ago Reuther would have hoped for a dignified convention, a salubrious shift resulting from the passage of Johnson’s, and Reuther’s, Voting Rights Act.

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