Travis, Robert Carroll

TRAVIS, ROBERT CARROLL (1905 –1979). A central figure of the organizing campaign in auto and a famously keen tactician, Robert Carroll Travis was later driven from the union by the emerging Walter Reuther faction of the United Auto Workers (UAW).

The third of seven children, Travis grew up in a semi-rural, blue collar home. At thirteen, he traveled with his father to hear Eugene Debs speak. Travis quit high school to work in the first of a series of Toledo auto plants, including Willys Overland and Chevrolet. As the Great Depression eased and factory production resumed, stirrings for labor rights grew. In Toledo, Ohio, as the dramatic 1934 Auto Lite Strike took place, Travis found himself drawn into the fray. Later, he recalled sharing a backyard spot with famed newspaperman Haywood Broun, lobbing bricks at scabs, with half a tire inner tube as a slingshot. Travis quickly became one of Chevrolet workers’ representatives to the AFL’s Amalgamated Local 18384, a step toward the newly formed UAW local the following year. When the union struck Chevrolet and won its first ever contract, Travis became the first president of UAW Local 14.

Local 14 comprised a wide variety of radicalized workers, including followers of A.J. Muste's American Workers Party. Travis, by contrast, became a protege of Wyndham Mortimer, an older figure in the huge White Motors plant of Cleveland and, like Mortimer himself. a quiet Communist.

In May 1936, the budding UAW sent Mortimer, its Vice President, to Flint, Michigan, to direct organizing there. The UAW’s first president, Homer Martin, felt sure that the task would prove impossible, thus diminishing the standing of his rival. As Mortimer made steady progress, the more conservative and bitterly anticommunist Martin plotted to replace him. Mortimer decided to withdraw, and George Addes, another rising labor leader from Toledo, proposed Travis as his replacement.

Mortimer had done a lot of quiet groundwork, and Travis followed Mortimer’s lead. Two incidents helped rally the union forces. Travis personally confronted a foreman famously harsh in his demands for speedup. The stern and successful warning against a bully spread like wildfire. A few weeks later, at the Fisher Body Plant, two brothers were fired for stopping the line when another employee was removed from their work station as part of the continuing speedup. The Communist core, working there quietly for months, shut down the line until the two returned to work without penalty. The union slogan became “No Firings.” Union membership surged.

Strategic considerations seemed to dictate waiting for the well-known progressive Democrat, Frank Murphy, to be installed as governor in January 1937, but many workers felt they could not wait. On 31 December 1936, after a lunch break meeting with workers from Fisher One with Travis, workers occupied the key engine plant and the strike began. It was an historic and pivotal strike. Workers remained in the plant for forty-four days and nights. The strike included a famous battle, labor spies, and military-style diversion tactics by the workers. At the end, on 11 February 1937, General Motors agreed to recognize the union as the singular representative in the thirteen plants where it had members, thus establishing the financial and organizational base of the UAW.

Several years later, Travis would be pushed out of the UAW by a triumphant Walter Reuther. He went on to become an organizer for Farm Equipment Workers and later for the United Mine Workers, notably organizing coal fields in Southern Illinois. Continually hounded by the FBI and repeatedly fired after FBI visits to his employers, he abandoned union work entirely. After an extended retirement, Travis died in San Pedro, California.

Keeran, Roger. The Communist Party and the Auto Workers Unions. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980.

Mortimer, Wyndham. Organize! My Life as a Union Man. Boston, Beacon Press, 1971.