[Congressional Record Volume 142, Number 48 (Tuesday, April 16, 1996)]
[House]
[Pages H3435-H3436]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                      A TRIBUTE TO SOPHIE REUTHER

  (Mr. TORRES asked and was given permission to address the House for 1 
minute and to revise and extend his remarks and include extraneous 
material.)
  Mr. TORRES. Mr. Speaker, I rise today to honor and pay tribute to a 
great American woman, Sophie Reuther, who passed away on February 20 of 
this year. This past Saturday, approximately 150 people, friends and 
family, gathered at the Reuther home to celebrate the life and lessons 
of this remarkable woman. Trade unionists from afar, from California, 
from Ohio, from Minnesota, from Michigan, from New England, from 
Canada, gathered to retell stories about Sophie's life, her hopes, her 
aspirations. She was a full partner with her husband Victor as they 
struggled for social and economic justice for workers in America and 
throughout the world. They were the true pioneers in the organization 
of the United Auto Workers of America.
  Mr. Speaker, there are not enough words for me to tell about Sophie 
Reuther, who I had the privilege to know. I therefore ask my colleagues 
to read about her legacy in a New York Times obituary.
  Mr. Speaker, I include this article for the Record, as follows:

                [From the New York Times, Feb. 23, 1996]

       Sophie Reuther, a Social and Labor Activist, Is Dead at 82

                      (By Robert McG. Thomas Jr.)

       Sophie Reuther, a social activist who captured the head of 
     the United Auto Workers' co-founder, Victor Reuther, and then 
     proved her mettle as a union organizer during the violent 
     labor wars of the 1930's, died on Tuesday at a hospice near 
     her winter home in Ft. Myers, Fla. She was 82 and had been 
     Mr. Reuther's full partner in labor and in life for 59 years.
       When they met in December 1935 at the Brookwood Labor 
     College in Katonah, N.Y., where she was a student and he a 
     visiting lecturer, Mr. Reuther was a dashing labor figure who 
     had spent three years traveling around the world with his 
     older brother, Walter, and had helped him found the U.A.W. 
     earlier that year.
       ``I think she was impressed,'' her husband said yesterday, 
     acknowledging that the feeling was more than mutual. She may 
     not have had his credentials as a union founder, but as the 
     daughter of Polish refugees who died when she was 15, Sophia 
     Goodlavish, or Sophie Good, as she was known, had already 
     made a mark for herself in labor circles.
       A native of Middleboro, Mass., she had her first taste of 
     organizing while working at a shoe factory and had later so 
     distinguished herself in raising money for unionized workers 
     during a shipyard strike that Norman Thomas, the Socialist 
     leader, had recommended her for a scholarship to the labor 
     college.
       ``She was a very prim young woman with a fund of social 
     idealism,'' Mr. Reuther said, offering a courtly labor man's 
     declaration of what he acknowledged was love at first sight.
       Mr. Reuther, who had been profoundly lonely since his 
     brother's recent marriage, said he was so afraid he would 
     never see her again after her short term ended that he 
     proposed.
       She accepted, and six months after their marriage in July 
     1936, Mrs. Reuther, using the name Good to hide her 
     connections to a high union official, was sent by the U.A.W. 
     to Anderson, Ind., to help bolster support for a strike at a 
     General motors plant.
       At one point, Mr. Reuther said, while he was on his way to 
     Anderson, his wife had to jump out a second-story window to 
     escape an armed band of Ku Klux Klansmen who stormed the 
     union headquarters at the urging of management officials.
       ``She went underground and it took me three days to find 
     her,'' he said. Before the year was out, he and she along 
     with his brother Roy, were purged during an intra-union fight 
     that lasted until the Reuther faction regained power two 
     years later.

[[Page H3436]]

       Walter Reuther, who remained in office during the purge, 
     also remained a marked man.
       In April 1938 two gun-wielding anti-union thugs forced 
     their way into Sophie Reuther's 25th birthday party at Walter 
     Reuther's Detroit apartment (a delivery of Chinese food had 
     been expected) and began pistol whipping her brother-in-law 
     until a guest scrambled out a second-story window and began 
     shouting for the police.
       When the police, widely assumed to be in the pay of the 
     auto makers, began a perfunctory investigation and asked Mrs. 
     Reuther to describe the thugs, she did not miss a beat. 
     ``They looked very much like you,'' she said.
       In 1951, after an attempt on Mr. Reuther's life, the family 
     including three children, moved to Paris, where he spent 
     three years as the Congress of Industrial Organization's 
     European director.
       They moved to Washington in 1954, when Walter Reuther took 
     over as U.A.W. president and Victor became his special 
     assistant and director of international affairs.
       Although Mrs. Reuther held no official union position after 
     1937, she remained very much a union woman, so much so that 
     when her husband, who she believed had been neglecting his 
     domestic duties, returned from one of his frequent trips he 
     found a list of her demands written large in rug shampoo on 
     the living room carpet.
       Known as a women who recognized no limitation on what she 
     could do, Mrs. Reuther obtained a fine arts degree from 
     George Washington University at the age of 55 in 1968 and was 
     a Robert F. Kennedy delegate to the Democratic National 
     Convention that year.
       It was during an official union visit to India that year 
     that Mrs. Reuther left her husband with the enduring image of 
     her humanity. At a mine near Calcutta, he recalled, a miner's 
     widow, an untouchable, approached his wife, bent down and 
     kissed her shoe.
       Then, in a breach of caste protocol, ``my Sophie reached 
     down and lifted the women up and embraced her.'' Mr. Reuther 
     recalled. ``The women were shocked. The men were shocked.''
       ``That was my Shopie,'' he said. ``She felt a kinship with 
     the suffering of all people.''
       In addition to her husband, Mrs. Reuther is survived by a 
     daughter, Carole Hill of Cowden, Ill.; two sons, Eric, of 
     Washington, and John, of Moscow; a brother, Edward Bezuska of 
     Warren, Mich, and six grandchildren.

                          ____________________