About Edward McClelland
Edward McClelland is a native of Lansing, Mich., which is also the birthplace of Burt Reynolds and the Oldsmobile.
Edward McClelland’s most recent book, Midnight in Vehicle City: General Motors, Flint, and the Strike That Built the Middle Class, is a narrative account of the 1936-37 Flint Sit Down Strike, which led to the establishment of the United Auto Workers as the nation’s flagship labor union.
His previous book, How to Speak Midwestern, is a guide to the speech and sayings of Middle America, which The New York Times called “a dictionary wrapped in some serious dialectology inside a gift book trailing a serious whiff of Relevance.”
After getting his start in journalism at the Lansing Community College Lookout, Edward McClelland went on to work for the Chicago Reader, where he met Barack Obama during his failed 2000 campaign for Congress. His coverage of that race became the basis of Young Mr, Obama: Chicago and the Making of a Black President.
His book The Third Coast: Sailors, Strippers, Fishermen, Folksingers, Long-Haired Ojibway Painters and God-Save-the-Queen Monarchists of the Great Lakes, a travelogue of a 10,000-mile journey around the Lakes, won the 2008 Great Lakes Book Award in General Nonfiction.
Ted’s writing has also appeared in The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Columbia Journalism Review, Salon, Slate, and Playboy.
You can find Edward McClelland in Twitter.
Midnight in Vehicle City: General Motors, Flint, and the Strike That Created the Middle Class
In a time of great inequality and a gutted middle class, the dramatic story of “the strike heard around the world” is a testament to what workers can gain when they stand up for their rights.
The tumultuous Flint sit-down strike of 1936-1937 was the birth of the United Auto Workers, which set the standard for wages in every industry. Midnight in Vehicle City tells the gripping story of how workers defeated General Motors, the largest industrial corporation in the world. Their victory ushered in the golden age of the American middle class and created a new kind of America, one in which every worker had a right to a share of the company’s wealth. The causes for which the strikers sat down—collective bargaining, a secure retirement, better wages—enjoyed a half-century of success. But now, the middle class is disappearing and economic inequality is at its highest since before the New Deal.
Journalist and historian Edward McClelland brings the action-packed events of the strike back to life—through the voices of those who lived it. In vivid play-by-plays, Edward McClelland narrates the dramatic scenes including the takeovers of GM plants; violent showdowns between picketers and the police; Michigan governor Frank Murphy’s activation of the National Guard; the actions of the militaristic Women’s Emergency Brigade who carried billy clubs and vowed to protect strikers from police; and tense negotiations between labor leader John L. Lewis, GM chairman Alfred P. Sloan, and labor secretary Frances Perkins.
The epic tale of the strike and its lasting legacy shows why the middle class is one of the greatest inventions of the 20th century and will guide our understanding of what we will lose if we don’t revive it.
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