Child of the Sit-Downs_ The Revolutionary Life of Genora Dollinger - Carlton Jackson [2]
As it turns out, some pretty heavy hitters in the labor movement agreed with both Luther and Genora.
James P. Cannon, founder of American Trotskyism, said, “If a revolutionary socialist party is predominately composed of non-workers it means that it can’t . . . make its programs a reality.” “Yes!” both Luther and Genora would have exclaimed. Separate the labor movement or the labor union from the people who actually do the work, and most of its constituency is lost. My father and Genora Dollinger saw this point clearly; the question ultimately was why so many top-ranking union, business, and academic people could not be as clever. Perhaps it was the difference between pragmatism and idealism. Cannon went further, saying that students and professional intellectuals—not the real workers in the fields of industrial endeavors—represented the first years of the Russian Revolution.3 Leon Trotsky, who Genora came later to admire so much, weighed in on this significant matter. In a letter to Cannon dated October 10, 1937, Trotsky wrote, “The task is naturally not to prevent the influx of intellectuals . . . but to orient the whole organization toward the factory, the strikers, the milieu of unions.” He added, “I continue to be of the opinion that [the Socialist Workers Party] has too many petit-bourgeois boys and girls who are very good and devoted to the party, but who do not fully realize that their duty is not to discuss among themselves but to penetrate into the milieu of workers.”4
The “milieu of workers” was the crux of the whole argument as far as Genora Dollinger and Luther Jackson were concerned. Luther—maybe he was a Trotskyist without realizing it—was a real-life coal miner. He went down into the pits and knew what a tipple and an adit were. Genora was a real-life worker on an automobile assembly line. She stood for hours putting little parts onto the developing automobile, and she knew how to read industrial blueprints and how to stir up workers for causes that she and, ultimately, they came to believe were just.
In some areas Luther and Genora parted company, because of both educational achievement and formal learning. Luther read, but mostly the Bible and other books of religious inspiration. Genora read, but mostly books by Karl Marx, Leon Trotsky, and other revolutionary leaders. Interestingly enough, my father’s interpretation of the Holy Bible and Genora’s take on Marx, Lenin, and Trotsky achieved a remarkable similarity. Leave out the religious connotations, and you’ll find Luther H. Jackson of rural Dora, Alabama, and Genora Dollinger of urban Flint, Michigan, in almost perfect harmony with one another. That is because they were both frontline workers. One became a deacon of his church, the other a revolutionary.
Genora Dollinger was closer to Luther Jackson in her life’s work than to, say, Karl Marx or Vladimir Lenin. Or, for that matter, Walter Reuther and many of the other tuxedo unionism leaders, as Genora called them. She had a prescience about labor unions and corporations: she was, as far as I know, the first activist to use the term “tuxedo unionism,” by which she meant that labor leaders of the late twentieth century would become more like corporate executives than representatives of the rank-and-file workman. From Luther’s and Genora’s points of view, such attitudes predicted evil days ahead for unionism.
By the 1970s, a mere 15 percent of young people in the labor force joined a union, and by 2001, that number had been reduced to 5 percent.5 At the turn of the twenty-first century, only 9 percent of the overall private sector was unionized.6 Perhaps it could be said that the unions by and large were “victims of their own successes.” Many of the things for which they had fought over the years had been realized: minimum wages, safety in the workplace, workmen’s compensation, and sick and maternity leaves.7 But, as Genora might argue,