Union Representatives Handing out Literature at Ford Rouge Plant, 1937

The Model T's distinction as a landmark car design can be traced in large part to machines like this -- a high capacity precision machine tool that performed just two production steps on the car engine's cylinder block. The Model T as a design achievement is inseparable from many hundreds of engineering, materials, and production innovations.

The image shows continuing United Auto Workers activity outside the Ford Rouge plant less than three months following the "Battle of the Overpass," in which Ford Motor Company security men beat labor organizers Walter Reuther, Richard Frankensteen, Richard Merriweather, and Ralph Dunham. Men and women hand out special editions of the United Auto Worker UAW newspaper while boys sell Detroit Free Press newspapers.

The struggle to unionize Ford Motor Company workers was long and--at times--violent. This photograph shows United Auto Workers (UAW) labor organizers demonstrating outside Ford's Rouge Plant pedestrian overpass during 1937. Four years later, following a turbulent ten-day strike in April 1941, Ford became the last major automotive manufacturer to recognize the UAW and agree to a union contract.