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Finally, I take pride in thanking my lovely family for their continued support of my publishing endeavors: my daughters Beverly and Hilary; sons Daniel and Matthew; sons-in-law Steve and Arthur; daughters-in-law Ling and Elaine; Grace; my grandchildren Colleen, Megan, Katharine, Travis, Patrick, Austin, Liam, Rowan, Carlton, David, Finn, and Alec. And, foremost and always, Pat.

Preface: Genora and Luther

Writing about the relatively unknown nineteenth-century politician Felix Grundy, historian Joseph H. Parks says, “The stories of the lives of the so-called great men of the nation have been told and re-told, but little has been done toward giving due credit to those who made them great.” Leaders do not “spontaneously spring into national prominence. They owe much to those lesser figures who, for the most part, remain behind the springs of action.”1

While Genora Johnson Dollinger would not have liked to be referred to as “remaining behind” the “springs of action”—almost always thinking of herself on the cutting edge of events—that is essentially the part she played in matters of unionism and feminism. She never became a forerunner in either movement, but she assisted enormously those at the very top. Who were they? The list includes John L. Lewis; Norman Thomas; Betty Friedan; George Meany; Owen Bieber; the three Reuther brothers, Walter, Roy, and Victor; and several other luminaries. Genora helped these people to get to the top of the list and to stay there.

If Genora helped the top to acquire and retain power and influence, her contributions also traveled in other directions. She could meet Norman Thomas at ten in the morning and “John Doe” at noon and be equally comfortable with both. She could relate not only to the rich and famous but to the common worker as well. Perhaps she could be called a pivotal figure between what was often intellectual unionism and real or practical unionism.

I raise these points because my father, Luther Jackson, was a coal miner in Alabama, and, like Genora Dollinger, he was a worker, not a theorist or intellectual. The two of them—and they never did meet each other—were the strongest of union people. In the house where I grew up, Jesus Christ came first, followed closely by John L. Lewis, head of the United Mine Workers of America, not all that much separated from the United Automobile Workers, the union with which Genora was most closely associated. As Luther—and perhaps Genora, too, at least in her earlier years—made his way to and from work each day, his mind, in all likelihood, was not on the esoteric niceties of the labor movement, either national or international. All he wanted to do was make a shift, go home to his family, and collect a paycheck every now and then. He was an example of how the working classes had, to a considerable extent, “absorbed the values of capitalist individualism.”2

Neither Genora nor my father ever finished high school, and neither was born into the kind of family that garnered any kind of admittance into the world of philosophical adjudications of unionism or labor movements or, for that matter, any kind of academic and intellectual pursuits. She fought and gouged her way into whatever program she was espousing at any particular moment, making her in a real way a professional reformer.

Luther and Genora were born worlds apart: Alabama and Michigan. Yet their basic beliefs about the laborer and his or her importance in the world of workers were more in agreement than not. Although my father would not have worried himself about the scholarly nuances of the labor movement itself—at least as it was expressed in paradigmatic terms by experts all over the country and, indeed, the world—in reality, at least during the first part of her career, neither did Genora Dollinger. Her approach to the labor movement was pragmatic, head-on, even in-your-face, much like Luther’s. They were the rank and file of the union, the heart-blood of the labor movement,