in order to separate the Communist leaders from the CIO; they continued to hold power thereafter within that portion of the union that was not raided by the International Union of Electrical Workers. United Auto Workers The CP achieved even greater results, but less long-term success, working within the United Automobile Workers. Like the UE, the UAW was also formed in 1936 out of a number of federal unions created by the AFL and locals from other unions in the industry. Of its 25,000 workers, almost all came from outside Michigan. One of the most prominent UAW activists in the early years of the union was Wyndham Mortimer, who had led a strike against White Motors in Cleveland, Ohio. Mortimer was elected vice-president at the UAW's first convention and might have been elected president if not for concern about his Party membership. Mortimer and the CP formed alliances at that first convention with George Addes, then the secretary-treasurer of the UAW, later its president, and Walter Reuther, who headed the UAW from 1947 until his death in 1970. The CP maintained its alliance with Addes, the center of the left-wing caucus within the UAW, for the next decade. Its alliance with Reuther proved much shorter. When the UAW decided to organize the industry by going after General Motors, Mortimer was sent to Flint, Michigan, where GM's production was centered. Even at that early stage factional infighting within the UAW, in particular between Mortimer and Homer Martin, the first President of the UAW, threatened to derail the campaign. When Martin pulled Mortimer out of Flint, Mortimer arranged for Bob Travis, another union activist and CP member from Toledo, to replace him. Travis played an active role in the Flint Sit-Down Strike, aided by some veteran CP autoworkers inside Fisher Body Plant #1 – but also by other radical workers, some belonging to Trotskyist parties, the Socialist Party or the IWW. The same pattern applied outside the plants: Socialist Party members, such as Walter Reuther's brothers Victor Reuther and Roy Reuther, and the Socialists and ex-Socialists working for the CIO cooperated with CP members, such as Henry Kraus, the UAW's publicity director, with a minimum of sectarian bickering. The CP, in fact, played down its revolutionary politics during the sit-down strike. In part this was to avoid giving GM and its allies an issue to use against the strike; in part it