Between 1904 and 1975, on a now-polluted site on the south side of Lansing, Michigan, one could find a complex of offices and factories committed to the manufacture of motor vehicles. Over the years the names and faces of the workers, managers, and owners changed many times, but one symbol provided continuity for the events that occurred at this place: the name Reo, an acronym for the founder of the company. Ransom E. Olds, the famous automobile pioneer and inventor, began the Reo Motor Car Company after he lost his first corporate venture, Oldsmobile. If you lived in Lansing during...

On December 3, 1924, faced with unemployment, a worker named Charles M. Killam of 711 Tisdale Street, Lansing, Michigan, wrote to the Lansing Chamber of Commerce. He was anxious about the personnel policies of many of the largest employers in the city and he determined, quite rightly, that the Chamber of Commerce might be able to exert some influence with these employers. His concern was not over the speed-up of the line or industry slowdowns, or runaway shops or inefficient management causing the economic troubles he saw about him; rather, it was the employment of farmers. Killam explained to Charles...

From its founding in 1904 until the late 1920s, the Reo Motor Car Company was an excellent example of Antonio Gramsci’s observation that “hegemony… is born in the factory and requires for its exercise only a minute quantity of professional political and ideological intermediaries.”¹ The concurrent developments of Americanism and Fordism during this period amounted to the “biggest collective effort to date to create, with unprecedented speed, and with a consciousness of purpose unmatched in history, a new type of worker and a new type of man.”² During the 1910s and 1920s, Reo’s management did attempt to mold a new...

September 1, 1924, Labor Day, was a day of mass celebration in Lansing. Representatives from every county in the state of Michigan descended on the capital city, many camping in an empty lot called the circus fairground just east of the capitol building. Large white tents and festive banners flowed as 50,000 men, women, and children watched a huge parade, with floats, music, and uplifting speeches by local and national leaders. The city provided police protection, but there was no need for the supervision except to coordinate the huge volume of traffic flowing into the city for the festivities. There...

The turmoil of the late 1930s began a twelve-year period of profound change, challenges, and labor unrest at Reo. In 1936 Reo’s board of directors decided to bow to competitive pressure and focus production on trucks and other commercial vehicles, while workers continued to organize in the shop. The disarray in the company provoked conflicts among stockholder groups at the very time that internecine union battles divided workers in the UAW.¹ The successful month-long sit-down strike of the spring of l937 had brought the UAW to the shop, but this must have seemed like a Pyrrhic victory to many workers,...

In September 1953 Reo employees turned out in large numbers, not for a strike but for the Reo family fall fair. The fair had not been held for years, but the company revived it as a way to celebrate the approaching fiftieth anniversary of Reo. Old and new members of the Reo family competed for prizes for produce and livestock, fine arts and photography, handicrafts and collectibles, fancy work, baked and canned goods, displays of curios and antiques, Indian relics and war trophies, and even a baby clinic. Floyd Schwartz, the strong-arm foreman who provoked the 1946 strike, cochaired the...

On October 16, 1965, approximately 150 students from Michigan State University, in one of the earliest demonstrations against the Vietnam War in the Lansing area, marched in front of the Lansing Division of White Motors. Fred Parks, writing for UAW Local 650 in theLansing Labor News, reported that “this un- American committee picketed the Lansing Division because we build military trucks,” many of them destined for Vietnam. “The government should have set up an induction center on Baker Street and drafted each one as they strolled by,” he wrote angrily.¹ The last two decades of Reo’s existence brought demoralizing...

The doors of the Diamond Reo plant might have closed in 1975, but Reo lives on today in the hearts and minds of many of its former workers and in the city itself. It is this ongoing relationship with a company long since gone that has made the history of this place, this company, and these workers so distinctive and compelling.

Since the plant closed, former Reo workers have been meeting in a variety of retiree organizations. These organizations were initially a response to the efforts to pursue the pensions squandered by Reo’s last owner, Frank Cappaert, as he divested...