Henry Kraus


Henry Kraus was an American labor organizer, journalist, and historian, and a European art historian.
The son of trade unionists who moved to Cleveland after his birth, Kraus was a member of the Young People's Socialist League. Kraus attended from the University of Chicago and received B.A. and M.A. degrees Western Reserve University in 1926 and 1927. He married Dorothy Rogin Kraus, a Jewish socialist emigre from Poland, whom he met in high school.

Labor organizing

Kraus became active in the labor movement through work with organizing Cleveland auto workers in 1930. Dorothy Kraus worked in labor movement arts and theater organizations, including the Workers' Lab Theatre.
Following the formation of the UAW, the Krauses moved to Detroit in 1936. He founded and edited the UAW's national newspaper, The United Auto Worker. He was an organizer of the Flint Sit-Down Strike and edited The Flint Auto Worker. Dorothy Kraus helped organize the UAW Women's Auxiliary and ran strike kitchens at Midland Steel, Ford's Kelsey-Hayes factory, and the Flint sit-down.
Sol Dollinger and Genora Johnson Dollinger were critical of his 1947 account of the strike, The Many and the Few, and of Dorothy Kraus's role in the Women's Auxiliary.
UAW President Homer Martin fired Kraus in 1937, part of an effort to purge Communists from the UAW. The couple moved to the West Coast in 1939, where Henry Kraus helped organize aircraft workers with Wyndham Mortimer. They left the UAW after the North American Aviation wildcat strike in Engelwood, California in 1941. During the war, he worked at Consolidated Steel Corporation and the Krauses lived in an interracial housing project in San Pedro, an experience about which he wrote in his 1951 book ''In the City Was a Garden: A Housing Project Chronicle.''

Later life

After the war, the Krauses moved to New York City and, in 1956, Paris, where Kraus worked as a European correspondent for World Wide Medical News Service.
He retired in 1962, after which he and Dorothy Kraus researched and wrote about medieval art together. He used the MacArthur genius grant he received in 1984 to support the research and publication of his UAW memoir, Heroes of Unwritten Story. His papers are at the Walter P. Reuther Library, Wayne State University.

Awards

Archival Collections

The at the Walter P. Reuther Library date from 1926-1960. His papers reflect his attempts to organize auto workers and the early history of the United Automobile Workers from 1935-1941. Particularly well-documented in the collection are the Flint sit-down strike and factionalism within the UAW.

Works