Child of the Sit-Downs_ The Revolutionary Life of Genora Dollinger - Carlton Jackson [63]
In late 1953 Genora wrote to Sol that he was, once again, going to be a father. “I am sure you have given me a little daughter this time because she has been so cooperative and hasn’t bothered me at all in any way.”37 She was elated to be pregnant again—rebuilding a family, with a considerable amount of nostalgia here—and it helped to lessen the flare-ups between them. Their slogan in earlier times had been “we’ll find a way or make one,” and now they seemed to be on track again. Sadly, however, Genora suffered a miscarriage, which plunged her into another deep depression. Her fragile health contributed to this unfortunate incident. In fact, the miscarriage almost cost Genora her life. The hospital attendants shunted her off to a small room, where Sol found her in a state of disarray. She quietly told him, “For God’s sake, get my doctor. I’m dying.” Sol brought in Genora’s longtime physician, Dr. Maxwell Golden, and he found that she had septicemia of the blood. He and his colleague, Dr. Englemann, a chest specialist, used heroic measures to save Genora, filling her with the latest antibiotics, including penicillin.
Even with health and personal problems, Genora and Sol tried to stay active in the SWP. They attended most of the local meetings and some of the national ones; remained active in recruiting; gained subscriptions for their magazine, The Militant; and sponsored numerous social activities. On the surface, at least, all was well between the Dollingers in Flint and the national headquarters in New York. But unbeknownst to Genora and Sol, a fight had been brewing in the SWP for some time over ideological disputes. One of the first signs of trouble occurred when Walter Reuther, president of the International UAW, stated that he would brook no political interference in the performance of his duties. His caveat extended not only to Socialists and Communists but to Trotskyists as well. “This was the first time in the UAW,” Sol Dollinger said, “that one was to be excluded because of political beliefs.”38 A large minority of the UAW who followed the SWP disagreed with Reuther’s growing despotism, including his opposition to a sliding-scale wage to offset inflation, and defeated him on a number of critical occasions. Such actions by the SWP minority group, to which Genora and Sol belonged, angered national SWP leader James P. Cannon; he thought the minority group wanted a party of “mass action” and predicted an economic depression that would lead to a Trotskyist-dominated American revolution. Such panaceas were idyllic, never coming close to fulfillment. Instead of the American worker engaging in “mortal combat” with capitalism, the movement to get rid of Stalinist influence in the trade unions became paramount.39 The Communists and the Trotskyists turned on each other, “letting loose a paroxysm of name-calling . . . that soon poisoned the atmosphere in the unions.” One independent Socialist remarked, “It’s fantastic the way the Communists and the Trotskyists hated each other.”40 A quarrel also developed between much of the SWP membership and Cannon over affairs in Europe and “fears of Stalinism,” which became a determining consideration. Two examples of this erudite ideological struggle included the Shachtmanites, led by Max Shachtman, who did not “view Russia as a workers’ state to be defended,” and the Love-stoneites, led by Jay Lovestone, who believed that “American capitalism was unripe for revolution.”41
Was Europe going in a Marxist direction? If so, was the emphasis going to be on Stalinism or Trotskyism? Another question was how to categorize several Eastern European countries.