Midnight in Vehicle City

Midnight in Vehicle City captures the Flint of today through the captivating story of the city's past. McClelland reveals the toughness, determination, and even recklessness that fueled autoworkers and their families in 1936 as they took on a corporate giant, the military, and an unsympathetic press. If you ever wonder why current Flint residents haven't given up, this book is an engaging reminder that fighting seemingly unwinnable battles is part of the city's DNA. --Gordon Young, journalist and author of Teardown: Memoir of a Vanishing City Lively and dramatic, McClelland's story of the 1937 Flint sit-down strike is told from the bottom up. From the shop floor to kitchen tables to furtively organized midnight meetings, McClelland paints wonderfully resonant portraits of individual workers--from Communist militants to naive hayseeds and everything in between. This is a book not just for students but also Walmart clerks, Amazon warehouse workers, and McDonald's 'associates, ' who will be inspired as they make their own history. --Nelson Lichtenstein, author of State of the Union: A Century of American Labor Edward McClelland writes with grace and insight about one of the most consequential, world-shaking labor strikes of all time. What a gift! Midnight in Vehicle City gives us both precision and power in the telling of an astonishing story with so much to teach those of us today who are wrestling with inequality and exploitation in the twenty-first century. --Anna Clark, author of The Poisoned City: Flint's Water and the American Urban Tragedy The battles were fought bitterly, often viciously, with rocks and bottles, blackjacks and hammers, against the brick-and-soot backdrop of America's industrial cities in the 1930s. The war was for the dignity of the American worker; the tactic was the strike. In Midnight in Vehicle City, Edward McClelland reanimates a historic standoff that changed America. McClelland spins oral histories, diaries, newspaper accounts, and other sources into a vivid, granular drama rich with characters, scenes, and the soulful gravity of the worker's fight for decency. --David Giffels, author of Barnstorming Ohio: To Understand America The middle-class prosperity of the post-World War II era didn't just happen. It was made possible during the Great Depression by workers who fought for their rights in a series of labor-management confrontations. None of these was more important than the Flint sit-down strike of 1936-37. Edward McClelland's lively and lucid narrative of this central event in labor history is a timely reminder that when workers act together they can bring about significant change--not just for themselves but for society at large. --Timothy Noah, author of The Great Divergence: America's Growing Inequality Crisis and What We Can Do About It