Ronald Reagan and Victor Reuther were born only months apart in the years before the first world war. They both died last weekend in America, aged 92 and 93. One is being mourned by the rich and powerful, with a lavish state funeral planned. The other is being honored more quietly by ordinary working people. Their lives ran along strangely parallel lines, but in the end they came to represent two very different Americas.

Reagan was the son of a shoe salesman in Illinois, while Reuther came from a family of a steel worker in West Virginia. Both were sons of the working class.
Both men eventually became active trade unionists. Reuther helped to found the United Auto Workers (UAW) together with his brothers Walter and Roy. Reagan was repeatedly elected president of the Screen Actors Guild.
Both men played controversial roles in the cold war within the American unions. The Reuther brothers, though committed democratic socialists themselves, purged their union of Communist influence. Reagan was also involved in struggles against both Communist and mob-dominated unions, and apparently quietly informed on Communists in Hollywood to the FBI.
By the 1940s both men were supporters of the Democratic Party — Reuther having abandoned the Socialists, and Reagan not yet having embraced the Republicans.
And both men were the targets of assassination attempts. In the case of Victor Reuther, a 1949 gunshot attack on his home cost him his eye.
Victor became active in the trade union movement many years before Reagan did — perhaps inspired by the example of his father who was an active trade unionist.
And while both men opposed Stalinist totalitarianism, Victor Reuther remained a committed democratic socialist even as Reagan drifted further and further to the right.
Victor Reuther retired from the UAW, where he had headed the education department and worked in international affairs in 1972, not long after his brother Walter was tragically killed in a plane crash. At the same time, Ronald Reagan’s career was just beginning to take off, leading to a nearly-successful bid for the Republican nomination four years later, when he was already at retirement age, and his election at the age of 69.
Though the two men’s lives were lived in parallel, they represented two sides of American life.
Ronald Reagan began his presidency by destroying the air traffic controller’s union in the most unabashed and shameless union-busting ever undertaken by the federal government. The unions never forgave him. Reagan’s years in office were marked by a spectacular decline in union strength — a decline from which unions have yet to recover.
Reagan represented that side of America which believed in the individual, distrusted government, and yet wanted to strengthen the military.
Reuther came from that wing of the American trade union movement which promoted “social movement trade unionism.” His brother Walter was the outstanding trade union opponent of the Vietnam War, incurring the wrath of more traditional labour leaders like George Meany who supported every military action so long as the enemy was perceived as being “Communist”.
Ronald Reagan is today being mourned by the rich and the powerful and by the millions who voted for him and even by some who did not. He is admired for his wit and his charm, and some give him credit for ending the cold war and bringing about the downfall of Communism.
Victor Reuther will not have a grandiose state funeral. Newspapers will not devote pages and pages to his memory. But for trade unionists everywhere, the death of the last of the Reuther brothers is a sad moment indeed.
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