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By Root 985 0

plus a recurrence of a painful attack of shingles. He did not get around to responding to Genora’s attack on him until December 11, 1986. He wrote a long, involved letter to Larry Jones, who had coordinated the meetings in Flint. It was an “ugly affair,” said Kraus. Jones, as chairman of the meeting, had some “responsibility for what took place.” At the least Jones should have “called her to order,” and since he didn’t, “you should have asked me if I wanted to reply to her nasty accusations.” Genora’s attack on Kraus was “such a mean and vulgar thing to do at such a glorious affair. Would I stoop to anything as low as that?” As Genora spoke, Kraus said, he kept looking out over the audience, trying to judge their reactions. “My impression was that they were suffering, deeply suffering, from the shock they felt in her ugly words and expressions and from the tremendous disillusionment they experienced after the great joy and pride they had shared with those who had participated with them in what was no doubt the most significant event in all our lives. Kraus knew that Jones had “a high regard for Genora,” but he had let her of “quite lightly” in this entire affair. Jones had agreed just after the speech that Genora was a “high-keyed” person who “had to say” what she did. He also acquiesced, said Kraus, in the thought that she should not have used such “strident and savage” terms about a book that had been written forty years before. Kraus asked Jones and others who might be interested to read the back issues of Flint Auto Worker “without prejudice” and see if he had been hostile to the developing women’s movements. Reading The Many and the Few would have revealed “verities” about “the author’s overall decency.” But, said Kraus, Jones had not bothered with these details and “Genora got away with her lies and the hundreds of people who heard them had no reason to doubt that they were true.”28

Who was right—or wrong: Genora Dollinger or Henry Kraus? Neither. And both. Genora wrote later that Kraus reminded her of a “commissar character scurrying from one meeting to another,” gaining confidence only in the “company of those he knew.” Physically, she commented, he was short of stature and had blond white hair, “which contributed to a sense of an insecure man.”29 Just why Genora thought one’s physique indicated insecurity, she never said (she was only 5'4”). Having always avoided stereotyping in her life and career, she fell victim to it on this occasion. Perhaps, as she said, she had been waiting fifty years to tell Kraus what her feelings were toward him, but it was not as though she had been silent all that time. Her friends knew all too well what her opinions were, not just of Kraus but of everything else connected with Socialist ideals.30

Genora could have misinterpreted the reprint of Kraus’s book when she charged him with not correcting feminist omissions. In 1947 Kraus had paid the publication costs himself for his book, to which UAW secretary-treasurer George F. Addes and vice president R. J. Thompson added brief introductions. In the 1985 reprint from the University of Illinois Press, there were no changes from the 1947 text. Kraus did write a new introduction, in which he mentioned all the letters he had received from thesis and dissertation writers on the subject of women in the 1937 sit-downs. There was also an introduction by three labor historians: Neil Leighton, William J. Meyer, and Nan Pendrell. And, it must be pointed out, Kraus did spend about seven pages in the original of 1947 and the reprint of 1985 on the role of women in the 1937 struggles against GM. He remarked that the strike “was often to prove the beginning of life to these women, at least the beginning of a conscious social life.”31 In book publishing there is a difference between a reprint and a revised edition. With the former (which was the case with The Many and the Few), a writer has little or no chance of putting in new material or taking out old. With the latter, an author sometimes has this privilege, but he still has to be guided by editorial