Background
He was born in East Palestine, Ohio, in 1900, the son of Jacob William Thomas, a railroad worker, and Mary Alice Jackson. When Thomas was about seventeen, the family moved to Youngstown, Ohio.
He was born in East Palestine, Ohio, in 1900, the son of Jacob William Thomas, a railroad worker, and Mary Alice Jackson. When Thomas was about seventeen, the family moved to Youngstown, Ohio.
In 1918 he graduated from high school in nearby Hubbard. From 1919 to 1921 he attended Wooster (Ohio) College, where he studied for the Presbyterian ministry, but he was too poor to complete his schooling.
Thomas worked for a while in the Youngstown steel mills and for the Ohio Bell Telephone Company and Western Electric. In 1923 he moved to Detroit to work in the auto factories there. He was first a metal finisher in a Fisher body plant and then became a welder at Cadillac Motors. In 1929 he took a welding job at a Detroit Chrysler plant. In 1934, Thomas was elected employee representative of his plant to the Automobile Labor Board. Two years later he was made plant president and overall vice-president of the Automotive Industrial Workers of America. This independent union became a part of the UAW at the latter's 1936 convention, with Thomas as president of the new UAW Chrysler Local 7. Thomas led his local in the sit-down strike against Chrysler in March 1937.
By the time the third UAW convention was called in Milwaukee in late August 1937, the union was already in the throes of internal warfare. Homer Martin, the UAW president, had alienated so many of his colleagues that the rival groups, collectively called "the Unity Caucus, " had formed to defeat him. The caucus and the Martin supporters agreed that Thomas, who had remained aloof from the factional fighting, be chosen as one of several vice-presidents. Thus, in 1937, Thomas was made a UAW vice-president and placed in charge of all bargaining with the Chrysler Corporation. Throughout most of the remainder of Martin's stormy presidency, Thomas managed to stay apart from the increasing dissension. Although Martin expelled several officers from the executive board in June 1938, Thomas was kept on.
By the end of the year, however, he and Thomas had finally split, and Thomas was among the fifteen board members Martin suspended in January 1939. The suspended officers, with the support of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), set up a second union headquarters in Detroit. Martin withdrew his UAW organization from the CIO at a convention in March 1939, while his UAW rivals held a convention in Cleveland. John L. Lewis of the CIO sent Philip Murray and others to this convention, and they persuaded the remaining UAW leaders to adopt Thomas, who had been acting UAW-CIO president since January, as their president. Thomas was regarded as sufficiently neutral to bring together the warring factions.
He was elected UAW-CIO president in April 1939. Because of the UAW split that spring, several corporations, General Motors (GM) among them, refused to bargain with either labor group.
One of Thomas' first moves as union president was to appoint Walter Reuther, who was the head of a huge Detroit local and a former member of Martin's executive board, director of the UAW General Motors department. Within a few months, the auto workers had made it clear to GM that the UAW-CIO was their only legitimate representative.
In 1940 the UAW launched an intensive campaign to organize the Ford Motor Company, a task never completed under Martin. The effort was successful, and Thomas signed the first Ford contract in June 1941. That same year he was unanimously reelected UAW president.
In 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt appointed Thomas to the Labor Advisory Committee and to the War Labor Board. Thomas made frequent trips overseas on behalf of both the War Department and the international labor movement, heading the American delegation to the World Trade Union Conference in London in 1945 and helping form what eventually became the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions. American labor had adopted a "no-strike" pledge during wartime, and Thomas, who was familiar with the American feeling abroad against strikes, consistently opposed any repeal of this pledge.
In 1945, just after V-J Day, the GM workers, under Reuther's direction, asked for a substantial wage increase, but GM refused. Reuther, insisting that higher wages for auto workers meant higher wages for all workers, led the workers out on a strike that lasted 113 days. Thomas had only reluctantly supported the GM strike and, by late 1945, was moving away from his neutral position toward an anti-Reuther group within the UAW leadership, headed by secretary-treasurer George Addes. Unfortunately for Thomas, the Addes faction also included a small Communist element, which left Thomas vulnerable at the UAW convention in 1946. Moreover, just as the convention opened in March 1946, the GM dispute was settled with a raise, and Ford and Chrysler agreed to similar wage increases.
Fresh from this victory and considered by some as the real leader of the union, Reuther presented the first serious challenge to Thomas for UAW leadership. While Thomas attacked Reuther's strike strategy as "fancy economics, " Reuther, an articulate, even compelling orator, defended the strike and underscored the Communist support of the Thomas-Addes faction. These tactics worked. After hours of vote-taking, Reuther was elected the new president by 124 votes. Thomas was made a vice-president again, and the Thomas-Addes group retained its ascendancy on the UAW board until November 1947, when Thomas was not reelected.
He then joined the national CIO staff as an assistant to its head, Philip Murray. Thomas had already been a vice-president of the CIO since 1939 and the secretary-treasurer of the CIO Political Action Committee since 1944. Murray had always had "a distinct fondness" for "the great big guy" and had even thrown his support publicly to Thomas during the 1946 convention. After Murray's death in 1952, Reuther became head of the CIO. Thomas remained with the organization, however, and became an assistant to George Meany in 1955 when the CIO merged with the American Federation of Labor (AFL).
Although Thomas suffered a stroke in 1962, he became a troubleshooter for the AFL-CIO the next year but retired on January 1, 1964. He and his wife moved to Muskegon, Mich. , where he died in 1967.
Thomas was "a roaring bull of a man in his heyday" whose tobacco chewing and frank speech endeared him to the rank and file, from which he had sprung. He championed the rights of blacks to work in the auto plants. He was honest but unimaginative and unable to understand the new labor movement that emerged from World War II. He had led his union honorably all through the war only to find his blunt, rather simple style of leadership no longer adequate in the new and complex postwar America.
He was married to Mildred Wettergren on August 7, 1937. They had one child, Frank.
