[Earth Day has been around for more than 50 years, but it’s more important than ever here in 2026. So for this year’s commemorations I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of the folks who helped create & popularize the holiday, leading up to a special weekend tribute to the work of two of our most impressive young environmental activists!]
On three ways that the iconic union leader’s progressivism foreshadowed his vital Earth Day role.
I’m not sure any white Americans played a more significant nor more sustained role in the Civil Rights Movement than did United Auto Workers President (and AFL-CIO co-founder) Walter Reuther. He did so as early as 1954, donating $75,000 to the NAACP’s Legal Defense Fund to support the case that became Brown v. Board of Education. He would go on to march with Martin Luther King Jr. and other movement leaders multiple times, to arrange the bail money for King and others when they were jailed in Birmingham in April 1963, to help plan the August 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom at which he gave a speech shortly before King’s famous one, and to send a famous telegram to President Lyndon Johnson shortly after the beating of marchers on Selma’s Edmond Pettus Bridge in March 1965. Every one of those actions wasn’t just inspiring and important but genuinely radical, offering both his personal and his organization’s support for a cause that was frustratingly divisive and even (among white Americans) unpopular. Which makes it entirely unsurprising that he would do the same with a new and potentially unpopular cause like Earth Day in 1970.
Moreover, that was far from Reuther’s only progressive activism, and another radical cause likewise foreshadowed his Earth Day efforts. In 1950, having been UAW President for just a few years, Reuther wrote an article entitled “A Proposal for a Total Peace Offensive,” in which he argued that young Americans should be offered the opportunity to travel the world in support of humanitarian causes. He spent the next decade making the case for that idea in a stump speech, arguing that “I have been saying for a long time that I believe the more young Americans who are trained to join with other young people in the world to be sent abroad with slide rule, textbook, and medical kit to help people help themselves with the tools of peace, the fewer young people will need to be sent with guns and weapons of war.” In August 1960 had the chance to pitch the idea in person to the Democratic nominee for President, John F. Kennedy. Kennedy agreed and committed to creating a federal agency that would become the Peace Corps, which he formally proposed in an October 1960 campaign speech at the University of Michigan. If you believe, as I do, that no cause has been more important to global peace than environmentalism, then Reuther’s later support for Earth Day makes perfect sense.
Both of those causes certainly foreshadowed Reuther’s support for Earth Day. But in truth, he had also been at the forefront of environmental activism over these same years, including organizing the UAW’s “United Action for Clean Water Conference” in 1965 and personally establishing a new UAW Department of Conservation and Resource Development in 1967. So it was no surprise that Reuther made the first donation in support of Earth Day in early 1970, and that the UAW lent it organizational and media infrastructure to the event’s leaders in order to help make sure that the national and global occasion would go off successfully. Earth Day founder Denis Hayes added that “Walter’s presence at our first press conference utterly changed the dynamics of the coverage—we had instant credibility.” And when Reuther and his family died tragically in a plane crash less than a month after the Earth Day celebrations, Environmental Action dedicated a book of Earth Day speeches to this great man, writing, “We would like to pay tribute to Walter Reuther, a friend and ally in the movement for peace, justice, and a livable environment. We admired his courage and his foresight, and we are deeply grateful for the help he gave us.”
Special tribute post this weekend,
Ben
PS. What do you think?
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