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her mother that her face “was still pretty crooked.” The big questions for Genora and her friends and family were whether she would ever regain her motor facilities and what brain damage she would have. These questions were answered only in the months and years ahead. There is no doubt that the beatings intensified the health problems Genora already suffered. But this intensity emboldened her further in union work and social reforms. She let it be known that even beatings would not stop her quest for social justice. Detroit police blamed the beating on union leaders, intimating that Genora was getting too “high” in union circles and had to be taken down a peg or two.63 Local 212 shot back at the police department, citing its lack of progress in investigating any beating of union people that had occurred since the end of the war. Genora and Sol and dozens of their associates put the blame squarely on the Briggs Corporation. First and foremost, it was a vigorous antiunion entity. Second, it was clear that Briggs’s leadership detested Genora and her unionism.

Ironically, a few days before her own beating, Genora had led a delegation to ask R. J. Thomas of the UAW to offer a reward for recent assaults on Snowden and Vega. Thomas was out of town, so the group visited Walter Reuther instead. Reuther took her lightly, saying, “Come on Genora. Let’s not get dramatic.”64 (Years later, in February 1954, Genora wrote an article for The American Socialist titled “I Warned Reuther.”)65 It was only after Reuther was shot—three years after Genora’s beating—that he favored serious reward money for bringing assailants to justice. Vincent Dunne of the Minneapolis Teamsters, a union that had suffered much violence itself, visited Genora in the hospital. From his experiences, he surmised, the culprits were thugs hired by the corporation: this was a pattern that had followed almost without fail in past labor strife.66 According to reports, Briggs had awarded a scrap metal contract to a son-in-law of Michigan mafia leader Santo (Sam) Perrone. In return, Perrone would supposedly “take care” of “uppity” union leaders. This lucrative contract, Genora believed, “resulted in at least five violent and potentially deadly assaults on [various] members of Local 212.”67 Though Perrone had run afoul of the law on past occasions and would again in the future, he and his accomplices were never, beyond a shadow of a doubt, placed at the scene of Genora and Sol’s beating in October 1945. At the 1951 hearings of Senator Estes Kefauver, Perrone denied knowing anything about the beatings. Neither, he said, was he aware of any Trotskyists in the Briggs plant, and he had never heard of Genora Dollinger.68 Genora slowly recovered during the remainder of the year, gradually resuming her activities in Local 212 and the SWP.

On the domestic front at Gladwin Street, one of the lodgers volunteered to redecorate the place. He began to “splash stuff on the walls,” and when Genora offered to help, he condescendingly told her that “this is not women’s work.” She called him a chauvinist. He replied, “For Christ’s Sake . . . I’m protecting women more than you are!” Genora wanted to know why he thought this was. “It ruins a woman’s insides,” he averred.69

Also at this time Genora worried because her two sons continued to get into trouble. Denny found a quart of whiskey and got very drunk with some young girlfriends. From time to time Denny suffered numbness in his tongue and face, and Genora wondered if there might be something mentally wrong with him. “No matter what he does,” she stated, “I love him and I hate him. I feel sorry that circumstances have turned him into something that he would never have been under a different environment.” Jody found and spent $8.00 in dues money that Simon Owen had paid to the union.70 On another occasion, her pent-up feelings of frustration led her to “whale hell” out of Jody for going to a show without telling her. She hit him so hard when he walked in at 11 P.M. that “she broke the slat and was immediately repentant.” She did not have