Child of the Sit-Downs_ The Revolutionary Life of Genora Dollinger - Carlton Jackson [28]
“If anyone goes to the house ask him their name. We will do the rest. If they don’t want to leave, shoot the bastard. . . . They’ll do anything to get us out.”
Sam wrote to Lorene that “if anyone comes around and says that I am foolish for staying in you just order them out. I am fighting for a good cause.”
Harold told Mable that “we are one happy family. . . . We are peaceful Chevy workers.” And Tony apologized to Emma because “I cannot keep my date with you on Thursday.” He was, however, “pretty safe with all these soldiers around.”
On and on these heartfelt letters came from the strikers’ wives, daughters, and sons, and letters to them, delivered by the EBs, showed that the workers, while determined to endure, still missed their families and home routines. In their entirety, the letters show that prolonged strikes come at a cost—not just in profits, wages, and salary but also in emotional expenditures.
Finally, an important result of forming the EB in Flint was that women in other strike-torn cities did likewise. Some fifteen GM plants were on strike in the early part of 1937, most in Michigan. “The news went out about the role women could play”—Detroit women wore green berets and armbands; Lansing wore blue; Pontiac, orange.72
The EB soon got into the dangerous business of confronting management thugs. Two years earlier, in 1935, GM had switched its Parts and Services plant from Flint to Saginaw. At the same time, it formed a “loyalty league” to combat unionization.73 Also, apparently, GM hired thugs to use strong-arm tactics against any Saginaw worker who might want to join a union. One worker, Earl A. Parks, testifying before the LaFollette Committee investigating violations of free speech and rights of labor, quoted the chairman of the loyalty league, Daniel Robbins, as saying, “These organizers will find that Saginaw is a hot town; in fact, we will make it so hot they won’t be able to stay. We might treat them to tar and feathers or run them out of town on a rail. We might send them home in a pine box with a bunch of Saginaw Forget-me-nots on top.”74
In the middle of January, after the Battle of Bull’s Run, a carload of union people went from Flint to Saginaw to bolster strikers’ spirits there. On this first occasion, UAW members took a taxi from Flint to Saginaw. On the way back, corporate thugs ran them into a telephone pole, causing one of the passengers to suffer a concussion. Saginaw had “been impossible” for the union, Genora concluded. Robert Travis and other leaders in the Flint UAW thought that Flint speakers could substitute for Saginaw speakers to keep them from GM retribution if they appeared publicly. On the second trip to Saginaw, Kempton Williams, UAW organizer and active member of the Socialist Party, drove the new Pontiac of Merlin Bishop (the UAW educational director) “because we felt they [Pontiacs] had more power to get away than any of our little old cars.” The other four who went with him were Bishop; Fania Fish, wife of the Flint Socialist Party (SP) organizer in Flint (who later became Mrs. Roy Reuther); writer Mary Donovan Hapgood; and Genora. Speaking to about fifty strikers in Saginaw, Genora noted that many of them wore bandages on their eyes, heads, and arms “from being beaten up.” After the speeches, the Flint group left, accompanied to the city limits by cars full of Saginaw unionists armed with clubs. After a few blocks, however, “a great big black limousine zoomed in ahead of our car and another black limousine zoomed in back of us.” Their intentions were clear. But driver Williams was a quick thinker. He turned off the lights to his Pontiac and sped up to eighty miles per hour. The group “went all the way to Flint and a good share of it with our lights off, zooming in and out, passing cars,” in what Genora described with considerable understatement as “the most dangerous ride of our lives.”75 Inside Flint city limits, the group knew they had reached safety. The tension had been so high on the journey that no one actually spoke. Now they began