Collection Spotligt: UAW Radio Department Records

The Reuther Library is excited to announce the opening of an addition to the UAW Radio Department Records. The collection’s new portion documents the office records from the department within the International UAW, shedding light on how the union ran the WDET radio station as well as produced syndicated radio and television shows.

One of the first American labor unions to use broadcast media to communicate its message, the UAW made a splash in 1948 starting two union-run radio stations, WDET in Detroit and WCUO in Cleveland. The Radio Section within the UAW’s Education Department originally oversaw these media efforts, and by around 1951 it spun off into the standalone Radio Department. The radio programs on these stations (and later syndicated across the country) brought worker-centric news and entertainment to the masses, options the UAW felt listeners sorely lacked. The union hired Guy Nunn to host Labor Views and the News, when they felt other stations were not adequately covering the union’s perspective during the 1949 Chrysler strike. He quickly struck a chord with audiences, and Nunn became the UAW’s broadcast celebrity, with a profile rivaling Walter Reuther’s. Nunn was put in charge of the UAW Radio Department, and the office soon expanded its efforts into television. The first show was titled Meet the UAW-CIO, and it was likely the first television program totally written and produced by an American labor union.

The UAW Radio Department Records have been open to researchers since 1969, with the initial collection housing a massive library of audio reels and scripts for the union’s broadcast programs. This new addition to the archival collection, housed in “Series VII: Office Files ,” reflects the inner workings of WDET and the Radio Department. This includes listener mail, program scripts, research materials for news reports and editorials, public health PSA’s, technical information on broadcast equipment, schedules and logs about WDET’s on-air content, financial records for producing original programs, and more. The Radio Department Records reflect a unique time of possibilities for the American media landscape, when organized labor could carve out a space for programming to benefit working people rather than corporate interests. It’s a fascinating collection now completely open to researchers, with nearly every folder offering something unique and unexpected.

Gavin Strassel is the UAW Archivist at the Walter P. Reuther Library.