Child of the Sit-Downs_ The Revolutionary Life of Genora Dollinger - Carlton Jackson [95]
She received another telephone call from Larry Jones, giving further information about the speakers’ platform in the upcoming events. He reaffirmed his wish to have Genora as a main speaker. “Well,” she asked, “who else have you got?” Jones listed a number of other speakers, including Victor Reuther, but when he mentioned Henry Kraus, Genora replied, “I will speak but I want to make sure I follow Henry Kraus. I don’t care what the program is.”25 Why was she so intent on following Kraus to the podium? She had a purpose and made it clear when she stood up to speak. As the saying goes, Genora did a number on Henry Kraus. Meeting in the Flint Auditorium on Saturday, August 2, 1986, she went on for forty-five minutes in a speech that was regarded as either sensational or regrettable, depending on one’s point of view. In 1947 Kraus had authored The Many and the Few, and that book became the focus of Genora’s presentation.
She started out, after Kraus left the podium: “This book has been labeled an historical novel [by whom, she did not say]. It is undocumented and is filled with facts mixed with fantasies, distortions, character assassinations, and the magnified role of the author himself. One can read it through and find only chauvinistic references to leaderless union women performing spontaneous acts of courage. Much of the time he calls us ‘the girls.’” In his book Kraus wrote about a woman at the Battle of Bull’s Run who had “hysterically” castigated the police. Genora wanted to know if the men that night had been hysterical as well. “No, only that woman.” And, if Henry, she told him directly, had been there that night, as he claimed, and if he took a good look at the present speaker, he would recognize that hysterical woman.
Kraus had spoken about the women gathering signatures and saying they wished to join the Emergency Brigade. There was no petition, Genora countered, only a spontaneous movement of women risking their lives by enlisting as militant strikers. She personalized her attack, accusing Kraus of having a vendetta against her when he edited the Flint Auto Worker, the main source of union news during the strike. Kraus, she claimed, had wanted the Emergency Brigade to be under the “immediate jurisdiction” of UAW men, even though they had their hands full fighting GM. Where could one read in Kraus’s book, she asked, or “in any of the books written by male authors,” of the five women “who strung themselves across the Plant #4 main gate, holding off the armed Flint police at the crucial moment before union reinforcements arrived? . . . Or of my directing the establishment of a large picket line circle in front of the entrance when reinforcements did arrive?” Coming close to calling Kraus a liar, she told him from the podium, “Henry, you weren’t there but you did have a news clipping bureau.” Instead, the New York Times was present, and she waved a tear sheet in front of Kraus. “Now anyone knows it has to be something important to get on page one of the world’s most important newspaper . . . right?” Then why did Kraus ignore the role of women in the Flint Auto Worker and then ten years later in his book, even after the New York Times had written a lengthy story about the work of the Emergency Brigade?
She then went into further explanations of the women’s work in the sit-downs, including the trip to Saginaw (discussed in chapter 4) to give aid and comfort to fellow unionists in that fiercely antilabor company town. She spoke about the “children’s picket line” and of the photo of her and her son shown in newspapers around the world. She quoted letters she received in 1937 from Robert Travis and Roy Reuther, lauding the contributions of the Emergency Brigade in gaining the UAW victory. Saying that she and fellow Brigade members broke tradition a half-century before, she rhetorically asked, “Did we know it was the first time in labor history that women organized