Word: socialism
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...boss was a genius. He was an eccentric. He was no prince in his social attitudes and his politics. But Henry Ford's mark in history is almost unbelievable. In 1905, when there were 50 start-up companies a year trying to get into the auto business, his backers at the new Ford Motor Co. were insisting that the best way to maximize profits was to build a car for the rich...
Commercially, this worked out beautifully for him. Most people prefer their entertainments to embrace the comfortably cute rather than the disturbingly acute--especially when they're bringing the kids. Movie critics started ignoring him, and social critics began hectoring him, because his work ground off the rough, emotionally instructive edges of the folk- and fairy-tale tradition on which it largely drew, robbing it of "the pulse of life under the skin of events," as one critic...
Within that context, Levittown became the anti-Williamsburg: Not a re-creation of some idealized past but a living glimpse of the ticky-tacky future. The social critic Lewis Mumford called it "a low-grade uniform environment from which escape is impossible." Levittown was also tainted at birth by the offhand racism of midcentury America. Though Levittown is racially mixed today, for years Levitt's sales contracts barred resale to African Americans. He once offered to build a separate development for blacks but refused to integrate his white Levitt developments. "We can solve a housing problem...
...nurtured to a devoted commitment to unionism. His father, a brewery-wagon driver and union leader in Wheeling, W.Va., had the family regularly discuss the role of unions, as well as social and economic issues. Like thousands of others who lived in poor regions such as West Virginia, Walter and two of his brothers, Roy and Victor, migrated to the Detroit area to find jobs in the auto industry. Not surprisingly, they became actively involved in the budding United Automobile, Aircraft and Agricultural Implement Workers Union...
Reuther's activism couldn't be contained by the collective-bargaining arena. One of many social problems that spurred him to action was the despoiling of the Great Lakes, particularly Lake Erie, a dying body of water that has been substantially revived by the cleanup effort he supported. At home, he helped mobilize volunteers to restore Paint Creek, a stream running through his community. He became actively involved in developing low-cost housing units in Detroit's inner city, including the Martin Luther King Jr. complex in downtown Detroit...