The early United Automobile Workers union comes vividly to life in this "participant's account" of the development of an organization that once embodied the promise of the American labor movement. Henry Kraus, a UAW founder and the foremost labor journalist of that time, combines interviews conducted more than fifty years ago with a decade of more recent archival research to present a richly detailed account of the union's beginnings. Kraus introduces scores of rank-and-file union members and leaders. Veteran organizer Wyndham Mortimer and labor pioneers Walter, Roy, and Victor Reuther, George Addes, Robert Travis, Ed Hall, and Richard Frankensteen - all are brought to life and depicted complete with personal virtues and individual foibles. The chronicle ends in 1939 as the author plans to start work on what would become his first hook, The Many and the Few.