It’s a little jarring at first. After all, this is prime time television – where detectives chase murderers, married men chase married women, and lawyers chase each other. So, if your jaw dropped when you heard union organizer Al Kahn talk about the Flint Sitdown Strike on ABC’s Homefront, don’t worry. You weren’t alone.
After all, when was the last time you watched a prime time series that features a group of workers trying to organize a union who are portrayed with dignity and respect. Can’t remember? Try never. Homefront is that unique.
Union organizer Kahn’s little speech about the Flint Sitdown Strike is not the only time he uses a piece of UAW history to build solidarity among the members of Local 311 of the fictitious National Labor Alliance. When the owners of Sloan Industries tried to use racism to divide workers on the eve of a union vote, Kahn evoked the memory of the UAW’s drive to organize the Ford River Rouge plant as an example of building black and white unity.
Homefront, now on Wednesdays at 10 p.m., is set in River Run, Ohio in 1946. World War II has ended and soldiers, some with war brides, have returned home to this middle America factory town. Women who’ve been worked in the plant during the war have been pushed out to make room for returning GIs, and Sloan employees aren’t happy with their wages or working conditions. The stage is set for a union organizing drive.
Nineteen forty-six was a historic year for labor. A million and one-half workers went on strike that winter – including 200,000 UAW members who struck GM for 113 days. Labor militancy – and victories – caught the attention of thousands of unorganized workers who voted for union representation in one election after another.
Bernard Lechowick, who co-writes and co-produces Homefront with his wife Lynn Marie Latham, says 1946 was “a watershed year – a time of endless excitement, contradiction, and hope.” Homefront mirrors that time in impeccable fashion.
Lechowick and Latham are quick to credit their researchers for sets, costumes, and the small details that make Homefront one of the most accurate portrayals of a historic American period ever made for TV. Much of the labor detail, they say, comes from almost daily calls to the Walter Reuther Labor Archives at Wayne State University in Detroit and the Georgia State Labor Archives.
They also rely on several books written of the period and magazines from the late 1940s, supplied by head researcher Deborah Mack, and interviews with people – retired labor officials, family, family friends and laughs Lechowick, “anyone whose hair is grey.”
“There is so much documentation of this period,” says Latham. “A lot of people contribute to making the show accurate.” She quickly lists supervising producers Dianne Messina and James Stanley and story editor Susan Wick. “It’s difficult, but it’s fun. Sometimes we joke that our next show will take place in the future, when there’s no history to worry about.
The detail goes beyond just how things looked in post-war America. Its strength lies in writing characters who act and respond in the ways that Americans did in the late ‘40s.
“We are primarily storytellers,” says Lechowick. “Lynn and I try to think of the audience as being not much different from us. We ask ourselves, ‘Does it interest us?’ and ‘Given the situation, what would really happen?’“
Mike and Ruth Sloan, the wealthy factory owners, are a case in point. They are pillars of the community who’ve built their company into a major employer. Their arguments against the union accurately reflect the way bosses then – and today – respond and think.
“The Sloans consider themselves enlightened employers,” says Latham. “They say, ‘Let’s find workers who are grateful for their jobs.’ They are very angry at what is happening.”
Homefront’s characters, explains Lechowick, “are not unequivocally good or evil.” Labor organizer Al Kahn, for example, tells a lie to get a strike authorization vote. It’s a moral dilemma, a question of what’s for the best, says Lechowick.
Some UAW members may blanch at the thought of a union organizer being portrayed as anything but totally honest, but it’s part of what makes Homefront good. Just like real people, decent characters sometimes do and say stupid, even bad things. They make mistakes. “Al is very driven,” for the cause of labor, says Latham. “He’s not always perfect.” Refreshingly, he’s not always right either.
Detail and strongly written characters carry the period nature of Homefront. But, what makes the series even more compelling, especially in the area of labor-management relations, is how much of it deals with issues that are as timely today as they were nearly half a century ago.
Thus far, the show has deftly dealt with such issues as the problems women face in the workplace, health and safety hazards, management schemes to foment racial conflicts, labor spies, and employer attempts of buy off union supporters with promotions and pay raises. Sound familiar?
Lechowick and Latham say none of this is by design. “We don’t have modern parallels in mind,” says Lechowick. “We’re just trying to reflect the period.” The connections that viewers see between then and now, he says, exist because much of what we have today – in the area of labor-management relations, for example – originated in that era.
“We don’t sit around in a room and talk about what’s bothering us today and say, ‘How can we get this in the show,’” says Latham. “in 50 years, although we have progressed a great deal, we still have many problems. Worker safety has always been an issue; it’s an ongoing concern.”
As writers, she continues, “we can’t take people from that period and give them our values.” In one episode Linda Metcalf gives a stirring show floor speech that wins the day for the union vote. It’s really mesmerizing, worthy of any union drive today. (Watch for the episode “All These Things” in reruns.) Yet, when the show ends, she’s quietly pouring coffee for the union men who sit around a table and hammer out their plans.
“Linda is a product of her time,” says Latham. “Men are leading the union she helped promote. I don’t think she would have said anything, even though we see it today. Does she see it? Not yet. If we are on long enough, I think she will.”
Homefront has its roots in Latham’s childhood. She grew up in a small Texas town where her best friend’s mother was a Belgian war bride who married a U.S. paratrooper and came to the States after WWII. “I was fascinated by her experiences,” says Latham, “and constantly amazed at our cultural differences. I banked it in my mind, and my original intention was to write a novel.”
Two war brides – one from Italy and the other from England – are prominent characters in Homefront. (A final detail note: In episodes that showed their arrival to the U.S., both wore dresses that were actually made in their native countries in the 1940s.)
Latham says she talked to Lechowick about her idea in 1983, while both were writing for the TV series Knot’s Landing. When TV writers went on strike in 1988, they stopped work and developed the idea for a series.
It’s probably no coincidence that Homefront was born during a strike. Lechowick says he has been “modestly active” in the Writers Guild for some years. “Writers are often treated like toilet paper,” says Lechowick. “Without our union they would be treated much worse. The struggles is hard enough for writers. I can’t imagine what it would be like without our union.”
During the strike, Lechowick and Latham asked Marcia Green, now associate producer of Homefront, to research the project full time. Once it was completed, though, they sat on it for three years, waiting for the right moment. Lechowick says they were warned that a “period piece” wouldn’t be accepted. Latham says she had a lot invested in the idea. “Once something is turned down,” she explains, “It’s hard to revive it.”
When the networks took on two risky shows – Twin Peaks and Cop Rock – they decided to pitch Homefront to them, and found a receptive audience at ABC. “The network has been truly supportive of the show,” says Latham. While Twin Peaks and Cop Rock are TV history, Homefront is a highly-rated new drama that has attracted a solid audience.
Homefront, of course, is about more than just the labor war at Sloan Industries. Family struggles, evolving relationships, race relations, and even professional baseball all help to keep the Homefront fires burning.
If you tune in anytime soon, you’ll learn that the union won the election at Sloan Industries. But management has refused to bargain a contract, chafing at the negotiation committee’s demand that it open its books (a demand that Lechowick notes was first raised by former UAW President Walter Reuther during the ‘46 GM strike). Angry Local 311 members were then locked out.
Only Lechowick and Latham know for sure what will happen next. But Bernie Lechowick promises, they’ll “try to be honest” in their treatment of the union. That’s a lot more than we normally get in prime time.