Online Book Reader

Home Category

Child of the Sit-Downs_ The Revolutionary Life of Genora Dollinger - Carlton Jackson [112]

By Root 900 0
the first major sit-down in the United States was by the Rubber Union in Akron, Ohio. In the mid-1930s rubber workers sat down many times, “protesting line speed-ups, wage cuts, and racist intimidations.” See Stephen Franklin, Three Strikes: Labor’s Heartland Losses and What They Mean for Working Americans (New York: Guilford Press, 2001), 118. In this same vein, Dana Frank reports that Michigan governor Frank Murphy claimed “that the masons for the pharaohs of Egypt used ‘sit-downs’ to express grievances” (82). Also, in 1715 workers on the Lille Cathedral in France staged a sit-down, English workers tried the sit-down technique in 1817, and in Cincinnati in 1884 workers at the Jackson Brewery barricaded themselves behind beer barrels for sixty-five hours to get better working conditions. See Dana Frank, “Girl Strikers Occupy Chain Store, Win Big: The Detroit Woolworth’s Strike of 1937,” in Three Strikes: Miners, Musicians, Salesgirls, and the Fighting Spirit of Labor’s Last Century, ed. Howard Zinn, Dana Frank, and Robin D. G. Kelley (Boston: Beacon Press, 2001), 82.

6. Patricia Bergman to the author, Aug. 6, 1998.

7. Gluck interview, 76.

8. For a close look at Governor Murphy’s role in the sit-down, see Sidney Fine, “The General Motors Sit-Down Strike: A Reexamination,” American Historical Review 70.3 (Apr. 1969): 699–713.

9. Patricia Yeghissian, “Women’s Emergency Brigade: Flint Sit-Down Strike of 1936–37 (senior honors thesis, Univ. of Michigan, 1974), 35.

10. Life, Jan. 18, 1937.

11. Genora Dollinger, interview with Jack W. Skeels, July 31, 1960, Univ. of Michigan–Wayne State University, Reuther Library, 20 (hereafter cited as Skeels interview).

12. Christiane Diehl-Taylor, “Partners in the Struggle: The Role of Women’s Auxiliaries and Brigades in the 1934 Minneapolis Truck Drivers’ Strike and the 1936/37 Flint General Motors Sit-Down Strike” (research paper, Univ. of Minnesota, 1990), 6.

13. Skeels interview, 20.

14. Genora Dollinger, speech to Chevrolet Local 659, 1971, Flint, Michigan, Dollinger Collection, Los Angeles.

15. See Helen Drusine, “Just a Housewife!?” in Sisterhood Is Forever: The Women’s Anthology for a New Millenium, ed. Robin Morgan (New York: Washington Square Press, 2003), 342.

16. Nancy Gabin, Feminism in the Labor Movement: Women and the United Auto Workers, 1935–1975 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press, 1990), 18.

17. Johnson, “Women’s Auxiliary.”

18. Gluck interview, 85.

19. Hassett, “Never Again,” 21.

20. Skeels interview, 21.

21. Joel Seidman, “Sit-Down” (New York: League for Industrial Democracy, 1937), 3–4.

22. Quoted from the Genora Johnson Dollinger memorial service, Oct. 1995. Victor Reuther recounts this story in The Brothers Reuther and the Story of the UAW (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1976), 156–57.

23. Fine, Sit-Down, 6.

24. Foner, Women and the American Labor Movement, 306.

25. Genora Dollinger memorial service, Oct. 1995.

26. Fine, Sit-Down, 3–11.

27. In later years, Genora told Fine that his documentation “sets forth the events logically and objectively.” Genora to Sidney Fine, Jan. 20, 1987, Dollinger Collection, box 2, file 17, Reuther Library. Seven years later, however, Genora had changed her mind. She wrote to Larry Jones that “Sidney Fine was so careless in his research. . . . [H]e traveled to L. A. to interview Bob Travis living out here but . . . did not try to locate me or any other member of the Auxiliary Number Ten.” Genora to Larry Jones, ca. 1994, Dollinger Collection, Los Angeles. Henry Kraus, the only eyewitness ever to write a book about the Flint sit-downs, The Many and the Few: A Chronicle of the Dynamic Auto Workers, 2d ed. (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1985), says that he gave the fight with the policemen its name of “Battle of Bull’s Run.” Victor Reuther, he claims, was probably the principal creator of the title. Certainly Kraus was on the mark when he wrote that the event was too significant to spend the next fifty years arguing over who coined the phrase. Henry Kraus, “Facts and Fact,” unpublished essay, Kraus Files, folder 2, Reuther

Return Main Page Previous Page Next Page

®Online Book Reader