Child of the Sit-Downs_ The Revolutionary Life of Genora Dollinger - Carlton Jackson [23]
The police retreat brought union rejoicing. Genora, Kermit, and her younger brother, Jarvis, built a huge fire in a metal drum and stood around it, making up new words to familiar songs.30 One was a parody of That Old Gang of Mine:
Not a cop down on the corner,
It’s a pretty certain sign
Our Union men are holding fast
That Old Union Line.
All the boys are singing strike songs,
They forgot “sweet Adeline”
Those Union Men are holding fast
That Old Picket Line.31
Another parody came from “A Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight”:
Now this scrap is o’er
the boys are sticking fast
We’ll hold our Grounds
and fight here to the last
And when this strike is o’er
We’ll have our contract fast
We’ll have a hot time in the old
town to-night.32
And finally:
Oh, it was a jolly sight on that wintry chilly night
When the bulls came out to throw us from the fort,
But with bruises, bumps and jolts,
From the storm of nuts and bolts,
They just turned about and made a line for port.33
Such heady feelings made some in the crowd believe that the strike was over and that the union had won. Nothing was further from the truth: the Battle of Bull’s Run, if anything, was prophetic of things to come.
Bull’s Run enlarged women’s roles in the strike. The women at Bull’s Run came to a “mature conclusion” of what must be done “if they and their children [were] to have a decent life,” and they were “behind their husbands as long as there [was] a need.”34 Nearly a month after Bull’s Run Genora wrote an article for Socialist Call, in which she boasted that “women from 16 to 65 went into action that would have made a cattle stampede on a ranch look like an afternoon stroll. . . . Yes, we women are as brave as our men any old day, and they’ll fight to the finish and so will we.”35 This declamation was largely hyperbole. She had rejected the title of Joan of Arc of the labor movement and began making it clear that although she was happy at the uplifting of feminism during the strike, she was hesitant to lead a gender revolution. She insisted that the home be infused into the union and the union into the home, with the woman still in charge of the latter. It was revolutionary in 1937, from both the viewpoint of the striker and that of his adversary, that a woman would actually get out of the house and do something publicly controversial. Perhaps this was why newspapers began to refer to Genora Johnson as the Mother Jones of the Automobile Workers of America. What Mother Jones had done earlier for coal miners, Genora Johnson was now doing for the auto workers. She much preferred this designation over Joan of Arc. She never forgave Sidney Fine, however, for saying in his 1970 book that the “participation of the women in the strike was probably more important for them than for the men.”36 Fine’s statement, Genora believed, missed the point altogether. She avowed frequently that the Women’s Auxiliary was not out to proclaim a sexual revolution; however, it was making a statement that women were just as capable as men, perhaps in some instances more so, of taking on dangerous situations.37
Noted labor writer Henry Kraus got some of the same cold-shoulder treatment when his book The Many and the Few: A Chronicle of the Dynamic Auto Workers referred to the auxiliary’s work as “defensive feminism” that protected husbands in the Flint sit-downs and called these women “the girls.”38 But writing for the Flint Auto Worker the day after the strike, Kraus faulted the police for using tear gas and rifles against “peaceful pickets.” Not a single city ordinance, he reported, had been violated when the police, deputies, and specially hired agents from the Pinkertons attacked. Kraus noted