Child of the Sit-Downs_ The Revolutionary Life of Genora Dollinger - Carlton Jackson [57]
Her entry into politics was highly predictable. Unwittingly, perhaps, she had been preparing for a political debut since the 1937 sit-downs and her experiences as a shop steward during World War II. She had an alto voice that could, on occasion, become quite animated as she argued her points of view. Though she sometimes mistrusted her own abilities, she had never been never shy, even in grade school or the Methodist church. This combination of nerve and oratory produced a political savvy by the midpoint of the twentieth century. American voters, though, did not easily embrace Genora’s message. Time and again the electorate hath shown its centrist characteristics, supporting neither the extreme left nor the radical right. Whatever else she might have been, Genora was a fire-eating leftist by the early 1950s.
In 1948 the SWP nominated her as a U.S. senatorial candidate for Michigan. When she became a senator, she told her followers, she would be a “thorn in the side” of big business corporations. She drew applause from her partisan audiences by asserting that, “as a representative of my class . . . the working class . . . one of the FIRST things I’ll do is to draw up a bill . . . making it LAW . . . that ANY company or corporation FORCING ITS WORKERS OUT ON STRIKE . . . [presumably through shut-outs and failures to collectively bargain] WILL HAVE TO PAY LOST TIME TO THEIR WORKERS FOR EVERY HOUR, EVERY DAY, EVERY WEEK THAT THEY [corporations] DELAY [the settlement of] THE STRIKE.” A “six hour day at eight hours pay,” she believed, would reduce unemployment and the practice of “pitting one worker against another.” After her election, she confidently claimed, she would be the “eyes and ears” of “her people.” Her senatorial reports would show the real conditions of the country—that the entire government was a stooge of Wall Street—and she would print her reports in union publications. “And who knows . . . these actual . . . revelations may increase their circulations to such an extent that we have Union daily newspapers!”3
Even voters who disdained the ways of corporate management wanted to change the system through reform, not through the revolutionary tactics they came to believe Genora counseled. She came nowhere close to winning or, for that matter, even collecting any votes. Sol checked an area “where I was sure of the count from friends and family.”4 No votes for Dollinger were registered. The campaign was less important to her than the opportunity to publicize SWP philosophies and perhaps recruit new party members.
Genora told interviewer Sherna Gluck that after a time in the senatorial campaign, she did not really enjoy it. Michigan, she acknowledged, with its two large parts—the Lower and Upper peninsulas—was too big for the number of personnel she had campaigning for her and the amount of money in her treasury. She was “damn” tired by the time it all ended, and she had known all along that she did not have a chance of winning.5 She did, however, greatly enjoy the shivaree, essentially a party with much food and drink, that a number of Irish voters staged for her in Lansing and that lasted all night and well into the next day. In fact, some celebrating groups went from one festivity to another in the capital city—exhausting but exhilarating.6
Politically undaunted, Genora forged ahead in 1950, running again on the SWP ticket for the U.S. House of Representatives from Michigan’s Sixth District. The previous defeat, if anything, had emboldened her. She wrote to the Flint Journal that “the capitalist politician . . . is in a class by himself. He can lie, deceive . . . and is rewarded with honorary degrees and prestige. While he doesn’t become a member of the Liar’s Club of America, he can surpass them with his flights of calculated imagination.”7 She was running for Congress, she claimed, “to give organized labor an opportunity to vote