Henry Kraus

Henry Kraus (November 13, 1905 in Knoxville, Tennessee – January 27, 1995 in Paris) 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. 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.

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.

Awards 1984 MacArthur Fellows Program

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

Works The Many and the Few, University of Illinois Press, 1947, In the City Was a Garden: A Housing Project Chronicle, Renaissance Press, 1951, Here Is Your Union: The Story of UE 340, 1952 The Living Theater of Medieval Art, Indiana University Press, 1967 (reprint University of Pennsylvania Press, 1972, ) "The medieval commune at Amiens as patron of art and architecture," in Gazette des Beaux Arts 78, 1971, pp. 317–30. Hidden World of Misericords, Authors Dorothy Kraus, Henry Kraus, Joseph, 1976, Gold Was the Mortar: The Economics of Cathedral Building. Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979, Gothic Stalls of Spain, Authors Dorothy Kraus, Henry Kraus, Routledge, 1986, Heroes of Unwritten Story, University of Illinois Press, 1994, The Acquisition of Courage: One Man's Journey to Commitment in the 1930s, Renaissance Press, 1997,