Child of the Sit-Downs_ The Revolutionary Life of Genora Dollinger - Carlton Jackson [26]
Membership in the EB was electrifying for the women of Flint. As one of them said, “After this [joining the EB] there was no returning to dismal, pessimistic thoughts of before.” New member Violet Baggett attested, “I found a common understanding and unselfishness [in the EB] I’d never known. . . . These people are real people and I’m glad I’m one of them. . . . I only wish I’d gotten mad long ago and investigated, but I didn’t have time for anything outside of my small circle. I’m living for the first time with a definite goal. . . . I’m ready and glad to wear my beret and Women’s Emergency armband anytime, anywhere I’m needed.” She was glad to be among women who “help[ed] men in their fight for decent wages and working conditions.”58 It was like a “new breath of freedom,” Genora exulted. The women in the EB were being emancipated from homes as well as poverty.59
Beyond physically and morally supporting their husbands, brothers, fathers, sons, uncles, and nephews in the continuing sit-downs at Flint, the EB asserted that it also had other important duties. One was to offer classes by teachers from nearby schools on parliamentary procedure, public speaking, and the history of the labor movement. Graduate students from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor came in to teach classes in journalism and creative writing.60 Another was to form a speaker’s bureau to sponsor notable individuals to speak out on the labor conditions in America, with specific attention to GM.
Cornelia Bryce Pinchot, whose husband, Gifford Pinchot, was a conservationist during the Taft administration and a former governor of Pennsylvania, argued before a group of Flint EBs that the first entity in the country to use the sit-down as a way of protest was GM itself. The corporation, she said, had used it recently to denounce the regulations from President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s National Recovery Administration. As a stockholder in GM herself, Mrs. Pinchot denounced its “defiance of the law” and “setting themselves above the law-abiding stockholders they are supposed to serve.”61
Another speaker was a member of the British House of Commons. Speaking to the EBs, Ellen Wilkinson, or “Red Ellen” as some of her countrymen called her, was “amazed at the political and social backwardness of General Motors.” The corporation’s labor policy, “if it has one, is still in the nineteenth century. . . . British workers told me before I left for America that I must be sure to visit Flint and report on the American phase of the sit-in campaigns that are sweeping the industrial world everywhere.”62 Ellen Wilkinson was not just any member of Parliament. The previous year, 1936, she had participated in the famous Jarrow Borough Council’s petition to Parliament in London and the subsequent 300-mile march from northeast England to get it there. Widespread unemployment was the motivating factor, but the march also highlighted the general unhappiness with the Unemployed Assistance Board that was not doing enough, it was universally proclaimed, to ameliorate negative economic conditions.63 Wilkinson’s appearance before the EB gave the organization an international boost and, for the most part, favorable publicity. After Wilkinson’s speech to the EBs, professor Walter Bergman escorted her to Fisher Two. They were forced to climb up the ladders to the second story because management had locked the doors to the bottom floor.64 She gave a tub-thumping philippic to the sit-downers, emboldening them to continue the strike.
Other EB-sponsored speakers included Mary Hillyer, wife a New