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By Root 893 0

The SWP minority faction wanted to declare countries like Yugoslavia as “deformed workers’” states—not capitalistic but not full workers’ states, either—“because they had already been absorbed into the USSR.” They were, however, eligible to be defended from “imperialist attacks.”42 Yugoslavia’s revolution gave it a deformed worker status because it did not side with the West or kowtow to the Stalinist regime, although it possessed some economic and social characteristics of each system. Yugoslavia was special in Europe because it produced a genuine revolution and showed the world, including the USSR, that it could and would fight to maintain its independence. Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Bulgaria, and the Baltic States remained under the bayonets of the Red Army and should be considered the same as the Stalinist-dominated USSR. Events in China also deepened the developing schisms within the SWP. These fierce and angry ideological disputes threatened to destroy the SWP in the United States. Its leader, James P. Cannon, realized that the SWP minority constituted a third of the party and was growing rapidly. The Dollingers stated, “Fearing that we would soon become a majority, he expelled us in 1953.”43

An increasing number of SWP members, led by Bert Cochran, worried that their party had become a sect with “narrow ideological doctrines” that the faithful were required to believe; dogmatism had set in. While such an organization might have been appropriate in the context of Russian centrism, it was “out of place” in the democratic atmosphere of the United States. Cochran’s followers, including the Dollingers, wanted an open party to “study the real situation in [the United States] and the world.”44 This meant, among other things, that the SWP should educate its members and workers in the broad aspects of Trotskyism, without always trying to start and lead a revolution for which few, if any—at least in the United States—were ready.

Although a dedicated member of the SWP—even serving as its statewide Michigan treasurer for some time—Genora joined Sol, Bert Cochran, and others, in creating the Socialist Union of America (SUA) as a replacement for the SWP. On November 21, 1953, in Detroit, the Midwest founding conference of the SUA outlined its principal programs. Its chief intention was to encourage members to join educational, political, and social organizations to convert people to the Trotskyist persuasion, thereby hastening the revolution. Their ambitions extended to religion, as Genora was quoted by the FBI as saying, “When we take power, we will educate people against God.”45 If true, this statement alone would have alienated most Americans from the SUA. There is, however, no evidence, either before this time or afterward, that she made this assertion. FBI agents were not going to say anything positive about Genora Dollinger, so it is entirely likely that they engaged in slanderous activities on more than one occasion.46 In retaliation, she railed publicly against “stool pigeons” hired by the FBI to infiltrate industrial plants and report subversive elements and activities, and these public appearances and pronouncements did not go unnoticed by the federal agency. The proletarian revolution, Genora exclaimed, was “the only means of salvation to the chaotic conditions of the world today,”47 and such statements led the FBI and other government agencies to think she meant force. Her party, first the SWP, and then the SUA, Genora thought, must be prepared to lead the way through mobilization of the disaffected social and industrial units in the United States and, indeed, the world.

Few U.S. workers embraced any kind of firebrand Socialist solutions to whatever problems they had. The last person an American worker might contemplate as he drove his car to work was his laboring brethren in other parts of the world. He was thinking of owning a home in addition to, perhaps, another automobile and obtaining what he considered the finer things in life. He was too concerned and tied up with his own personal household to worry