Child of the Sit-Downs_ The Revolutionary Life of Genora Dollinger - Carlton Jackson [92]
What’s good for the corporate boss
is good for you and all the nation;
so help him in both profit and loss
to ensure his mammon-inspired salvation.
Labor run unions are now out of date,
but Papa knows best, be sure of that;
let the ‘boss-man’ lead, for heaven can wait
as the strike to win is now old hat.3
The poem suited Genora’s mood; her beloved labor unions of 1937 and beyond had given up the fight. They appeared willing to see loyal workmen’s jobs go to the American South or to Mexico, just to please the latest whims of executive overlords. Why have a strike these days when everyone knew the union leaders would capitulate before it was even half over. She told Lynn Goldfarb that “there are so few bright spots on the labor scene today . . . what a sorry role is being played by the . . . leadership.”4
Another disadvantage for modern labor, she felt, was the “robot revolution,” which constantly replaced workers, particularly women.5 Those opposed to increased mechanization had about as much chance to stop it as had the nineteenth-century levelers in England’s Industrial Revolution. The way around robotics was for workers to insist that management bring them into the decision-making process. Genora reemphasized her beliefs that government should own the means of production and distribution of basic industries. Ideally, Genora also desired the creation of a labor party in the United States, one that would truly represent the best interests of working people.6 She told one professor and researcher after another that feminism still remained uppermost in her mind and was concerned once again (as seen in the unveiling of the plaques in Flint) that it was being ignored and downplayed. The young historians in the 1980s may have been sincere but were “incapable of doing more than collecting facts.”7 They possessed no analytical skills and therefore could not assess feminism in the context of the rise of labor unions. She repeatedly reminded journalists and historians of Kermit Johnson’s and her plans for taking Plant Four (discussed in chapter 4), only to see the story excluded from newspapers and books. Even if she had not been involved in the strategic parts of the matter, she frequently told Larry Jones, she had typed the lawyer’s documentation for it and fought it through the ranks until it received official approval.8
These activities and observations notwithstanding, Genora joined Sol in 1983 on another European trip. In Amsterdam, she visited forty museums, and even these did not satisfy her appetite for paintings and other works of art. When the pair arrived in Lausanne, Genora found that it had no art museums, and they left quickly for Geneva. In Munich, Genora took offense at a comment by a woman gas station attendant who told the Dollingers that she had been to the United States only once—to Texas, which was, the German said, “a very bad place.” Why? “Too many ‘schwartzas’ [African Americans],” she responded, leading Genora to conclude that the attendant was a neo-Nazi. She was saddened to realize, once again, that racial prejudice is a worldwide problem. The couple went to Dachau, walking for hours in that place of horror, studying the remnants of unspeakable cruelties. Perhaps the gas station attendant and Dachau caused Genora to write in her diary that she had ordered German food with “great trepidation.” She did not know whether she was ordering “pig’s snouts” or “pig’s testicles.”9 She did not become anti-German on this trip, but it definitely cooled her ardor for “das Land der Mitte”(the Land in the Middle).
Her next trip abroad was to China in May 1984. She became too ill even to go to the Great Wall outside Beijing. After her health improved somewhat, she and Sol traveled to Shanghai. Here, a physician diagnosed her problems as heart troubles and told them to go home, as the Chinese hospitals did not have the equipment