FORD'S BRASS KNUCKLES: Harry Bennett, The Cult of Muscularity, and Anti-Labor Terror - 1920-1945.

The article discusses the "war on unionism" by Ford Motor Company's war effort against the United Automobile Workers and Committee of Industrial Organization (UAW-CIO). A wrestler named "Fats" Perry was summoned by the production manager of Ford on the charges of forming an "outside" squad which consisted of group of employees of unusual muscular development drawn from the plant's champion tug-of-war team. The CIO was directed by Harry Bennett. The U.S. was the only advanced industrial country where business corporations wielded coercive military power. Paradoxically, the nation that never experienced feudalism and that pioneered in introducing civil liberties allowed corporations to develop powerful private armies that often operated outside the law, denying workers' basic Constitutional rights. All of the automobile manufacturers and their parts suppliers were hostile to unionism and used systematic espionage and sometimes violence to discourage it, but none fought it as violently as Ford, which was alone in establishing a private army.