Ebook: I Remember Like Today: The Auto-Lite Strike of 1934

The strikes at Auto-Lite in Toledo in he spring of 1934 secured a victory for the fledgling Automobile Workers Federal Union Local 18384 of the AFL and permanently altered the nature of worker-employer relationships in Toledo. This victory assured that working men and women in Toledo would have some power over their working lives and a voice in their community. Workers in Toledo today owe a debt of gratitude to the "unholy thirteen" who huddled over the fires burning in drums in front of Auto-Lite and who dreamed of freedom and dignity. And as today grows out of yesterday, so the workers in 1934 faced a set of conditions and attitudes shaped decades before by the industrial evolution of Toledo, the development of the automobile industry, and the historical struggles of their ancestors. Cover Photograph: An Auto-Lite striker returns a smoke bomb thrown by factory strike breakers. (May, 1934.) Orral history adds color to historical econstruction, but it also enhances understanding; it personalizes history through concrete experience and thus adds a dimension difficult to capture through conventional historical methods. To the thoughtful scholar, history is never dead; but it may sometimes need reviving, and oral history can breathe new life into it. Oral traditions are not merely an anachronistic residue from prehistorical cultures but are important molders of modern cultures. The struggle for dignity and freedom, two abstract terms so central to the meaning of American history, was not abstract. It occurred in real and concrete circumstances where ordinary people asserted themselves. The struggle presented here helped create American culture. Knowing about that struggle can help us understand where we came from and who we are. It may even teach us something about the human condition. Philip A. Korth is a professor of American Thought and Language at Michigan State University. Margaret R. Beegle is with the History Department at the University of Minnesota.