Child of the Sit-Downs_ The Revolutionary Life of Genora Dollinger - Carlton Jackson [36]
Needing appropriate dress for the occasion, she went shopping with Fania Fish and bought a gray suit for her trip, realizing as soon as she got home that she did not like it. She did not take it back, because a negative reaction from a TB treatment at her physician’s office caused her to postpone her trip for a day. She left Flint on April 28, heading for Philadelphia. Her train went through areas of Canada, and she was impressed with the destruction that the floods of 1937 had caused all over the United States and Canada. In Canada alone, to say nothing of the United States, more than 6,000 homes were lost.7 Seeing the aftermath of nature at its most destructive, she reflected that the New Deal government of President Franklin D. Roosevelt was neglecting flood victims all the way from Kentucky to Pennsylvania.
In Philadelphia she toured Fairmont Park and Germantown and attended a conference of the United May Day committee, where she spoke to several members of the YPSL and told them about what she considered to be the virtues of a Socialist approach to the country’s problems. She also told a large Socialist gathering of all ages that the Soviet Union seemed to be solving problems of the Depression better than the United States. Arriving in New York City on May 1, she spoke at Union Square to the masses of labor union members in the metropolitan area. The Women’s Socialist Guard honored Genora for her work in the sit-downs and presented her with a check for the furtherance of Socialist causes.8 She watched the annual May Day parade with several Socialist dignitaries. Thousands of union people filled Fifth Avenue from curb to curb, and monitors were lit with Socialist slogans. Members of unions came in work clothes indigenous to their trades. The painters wore white shirts and caps, and sailors wore blue denim shirts and Levis. Each group carried its own banners and posters. The Communists had the largest contingent. The Socialists bore banners that read DOWN WITH WALL STREET, and they sang “Hold the Fort” and “Solidarity Forever.”9 The parade lasted the entire day.
Genora welcomed the time she could spend as a tourist. She went to Central Park, St. Patrick’s Cathedral, and Radio City Music Hall, and she attended a reception in her honor at the home of Corliss and Margaret Lamont. On May 3 she went to Norman Thomas’s home for a press conference, primarily with the city’s Socialist press. She lunched with the editor of Woman Today and then in the afternoon visited the Empire State Building. That evening she was named the honorary chairwoman of the Women’s Guard of New York City.10
On the morning of May 4 she went shopping with Vicky and Eda Trager for dresses. In the afternoon Mary Hillyer drove her along Riverside Drive and the banks of the Hudson River. She saw the HMS Queen Mary in dock, and later that evening she addressed 1,000 auto strikers in Yorkville Center, telling them of her experiences in Flint and that the best way to win was to persevere.11 On May 5, in Poughkeepsie, she addressed a number of Vassar College girls and sat up until 4 A.M. with them, singing union songs and telling the young ladies, many from “capitalistic” homes, about the virtues of industrial democracy. The next day, back in the city to arrange a flight to Cleveland, she spoke to a mass gathering of United Auto Workers and to the United Labor Congress. Her message had now become a set speech: nothing comes free, you always pay a price, you have to be brave and proud, and, above all else, persevere. In Cleveland she had a long talk with Wyndham Mortimer, a well-known Communist functionary, although he did not admit to being one until years later. Bert Cochran, a leading Trotskyist