Child of the Sit-Downs_ The Revolutionary Life of Genora Dollinger - Carlton Jackson [16]
An important activity of the Flint Socialists consisted of small groups meeting each week and studying the history of past labor struggles. The members heard about the Molly Maguires (a group of militant coal miners in Pennsylvania in the 1870s), the Knights of Labor, and the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters.25 They discussed, among other things, the plight of the proletariat in America and why something should be done about it. They learned that doing the right thing always demanded a price be paid. In these study sessions, the Flint Socialists prepared themselves for the confrontation with GM they increasingly began to predict.
Genora was enamored of Carl’s explanations of the world and how it should be fixed. Under his tutelage, she learned of the direct connections between economies and politics.26 This became one of her first formal introductions to the world of Socialism. Why were Americans suffering through the Great Depression, which had begun with the stock market crash of 1929? Why wasn’t President Herbert Hoover doing something about it? Government, she heard from Carl Johnson and other Socialists, comes into existence not simply to make people behave themselves but to help them in times of need. Where was help from the government? Not only was there not any, but also President Hoover seemed downright hostile to the idea that government should take care of its poor and needy citizens. The proletariat especially, Socialists believed, suffered hard times in the United States; they thought the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) provided better for poor people than the United States did. Ultimately Genora outpaced Carl Johnson and other Socialists in Flint in ideology; she was a fast reader who digested and retained the written word better than most of those around her.
To Genora, the best part of the Socialist Party was the way it treated women. Neither the Republicans nor the Democrats put a suffrage plank in their platforms until 1916. Yet, in 1901, when the Socialist Party was formed in America, women were present as delegates. Within a few years, women in the party were receiving grant monies and organizational support “for reaching women and agitating questions of special relevance to women.”27 Genora learned that “no other political party in American history has ever fought as consistently for women’s rights” such as suffrage, employment opportunities, and equal rights as the Socialist Party. “The Socialist Party’s conception of what women’s rights were . . . agreed in all respects with those advocated by liberal feminists.”28
Genora landed a job as an assistant to a Flint pediatrician and worked in his outer office as a receptionist. It seemed appropriate employment for her as she was expecting a child herself. The physician received many magazines, and one of them, American Guardian, was published by well-known Oklahoma Socialist, Oscar Ameringer.29 Someone, Genora reckoned, had seen American Guardian in the pediatrician’s office and had thrown this “offensive” journal into the wastebasket. Out of curiosity, she retrieved it and began reading. The articles in this magazine reinforced what she had been hearing from her Socialist colleagues. Justice for the working man? What right-minded individual could not be in favor of such? It certainly was not unusual for such subjects to be readily available for discussion in Flint, Michigan, one of the flashpoints of the twentieth-century labor movements. She read the articles in the discarded magazine with increasing interest and wondered, first, why it had been