The 1940s

ABOVE Strikers confront a strikebreaker during the 1941 walkout of Ford‘s Dearborn Rouge plant. Detroit News photographer Milton Brooks took the picture, which was the first photo to win in the new Pulitzer category for photojournalism.

MILTON BROOKS / THE DETROIT NEWS

ABOVE LEFT Strikers hold up The Detroit News announcing the end of the strike at a Ford Motor Company plant in April 1941. After a long and bitter struggle on the part of Henry Ford against organized labor, Ford Motor Company signed its first contract with the United Auto Workers and Congress of Industrial Organizations (UAW-CIO) on June 20, 1941. THE DETROIT NEWS

LEFT Workers at the Ford Rouge plant assemble an airplane engine, November 26, 1941. THE DETROIT NEWS

OPPOSITE The Detroit News, April 11, 1941. “With only a few dissenting votes in a crowd of about 20,000, a United Automobile Workers (CIO) meeting in the State Fair Coliseum Thursday night approved the Governor’s Ford peace proposal and authorized a committee to call off the strike as soon as a satisfactory settlement was reached on a company counter proposal.

Cheers greeted statements of leaders that ‘for the first time in its history, the Ford Motor Co. has recognized the UAW-CIO.’ Promises that a formal contract would be obtained ‘after the UAW-CIO wins exclusive bargaining rights in a labor board election’ also brought wild applause.

Gov. Van Wagoner was praised by the speakers and cheered by the audience, especially when one official stated the Governor had refused to call out troops to protect a back-towork movement.”