THE CIO AFTER 50 YEARS: an INTERVIEW WITH GENORA JOHNSON
Meyerson, Harold
The breakthrough for the CIO and industrial unionism came at Flint, Michigan, in the winter of 1936-37. On December 30, 1936, United Auto Workers militants sat in at General Motors' Fisher Body...
...I was incensed at what was happening...
...So I said to the crowd at the top of the hill: "People of the City of Flint: do you know the police are shooting unarmed men down here...
...A: None...
...Penny's...
...They had lip readers in the shop who could be one aisle away from you and see what you were saying...
...A: The strike began on December 30th, and on New Year's Eve I happened to be on the Fisher Two picket line when we saw these women coming down...
...It was a very potent thing...
...I asked Victor to let me speak, though I wasn't known as a sound-car speaker...
...I was the only woman down there that night...
...So there was a lot of ferment in the city...
...He was teaching workers' education classes for the Mott Foundation (which was financed by General Motors' largest shareholder, Charles Stewart Mott), and Roy was instructing a lot of people in such things as labor history and parliamentary procedure...
...Of course, the Socialist party in New York and Detroit would send in people to tell us about it...
...So he did more groundwork than the other Reuther brothers...
...After we were defeated [at getting the plan approved], I wrote a two-page letter to Norman Thomas...
...The Lovestoneites took a terrific, bloody beating when we took Plant Four, but there was very little of that in the Flint Auto Worker...
...Chevrolet Axle and different plants in Saginaw, Michigan...
...They had an international department set up, and they issued a beautiful bulletin...
...A: No, they really didn't...
...Several weeks later, throwing the company off balance with a diversionary raid on Flint's Chevrolet plant Nine, the UAW occupied Chevy Four, effectively tying up most of GM's engine production...
...Q: What happened to the Women's Emergency Brigade after Flint...
...Then up at one end of the street came the flag and the red berets and the Brigade singing "Hold the Fort for We Are Coming," and around Chevrolet Avenue on the other end came the sound car and the union men...
...At first, the plan to seize the plant was rejected by Walter Reuther...
...Then the International formed the Women's Auxiliaries in all the locals...
...He was a member of the Socialist party...
...Q: When John L. Lewis slugged [the carpenters union president] Bill Hutchinson at the 1935 AFL convention in Atlantic City, and then resigned from the AFL board and convened the CIO a couple of weeks later, what kind of reaction did that produce a thousand miles away, in Flint...
...A: No...
...Q: Were any of these women employed in the plants...
...A: You noticed it only in the little political groupings, but otherwise it didn't make a great big ripple until we really attempted to get in touch with the CIO...
...In fact, when they made With Babies and Banners and they led me up to that house, I never quite forgave them for it...
...For some time before the strike, Roy Reuther was in Flint...
...For a while, of course, there was a slew of sit-ins — A: — The women were sent all over: a cigar makers' strike outside of Detroit...
...they were not yet in a well-barricaded position...
...Of my four lieutenants, three happened to be single, and they were plant workers...
...We didn't want the police to become suspicious that there was anything else going on...
...Our headquarters were in the Pengally Building, which later became the organizing headquarters for the UAW in Flint...
...they were being given all kinds of inducements, because General Motors needed them for their back-to-work movement...
...I interviewed Genora Dollinger for Dissent in Los Angeles on May 11...
...Q: Before the founding days of the CIO, what had there been in the way of political or union organizing in Flint...
...American industrial and social relations were permanently altered...
...That was the plant that won the strike, Plant Four, which made all the motors for GM cars...
...Go back and look at the oldest ones, and you'll find they conducted classes on how to dress properly, on the latest fashions, on hair coiffure and cooking and sewing...
...Q: What were relations like during the strike between the Socialist party, the Communist party, and the other left groups...
...I made it more and more bloody-sounding because I didn't want weak characters or women who had a lot of children—but I had a great deal of difficulty in restraining them...
...Within a few months, Chrysler had followed suit, and United States Steel had recognized the Steelworkers...
...By the '30s] there were no remnants of that...
...When did you feel the impact of that in Flint...
...You must remember that every policeman had an uncle or brother or relative working in the plants somewhere, and they knew how tough GM was, so we got them to procrastinate by saying, "If your wife was out here and you were working in that plant, wouldn't you expect her to stay...
...I gave the bloodiest talk you ever heard in your life...
...you had to go on battling...
...some of the men actually came out of the plant...
...0: How far into the Flint strike did you go before you set up the Women's Emergency Brigade...
...When it was over, the Brigade and the men went back toward the Pengally Building...
...It was like a new breath of freedom for them: they were being emancipated from their homes as well as their poverty...
...And the union wouldn't let women sit in, because the press would have used that against us...
...H.M...
...And that's what the International turned the Women's Auxiliary into...
...They had some very competent leadership from Fisher One, but they were never elected to anything...
...When was it conceived, and why...
...Q: The Brigade played a role in the action where the UAW pretended to take over one plant — A: — You bet we did...
...and the whole Brigade was there, flags, clubs, everything: we broke windows so the men could breathe...
...They talked just long enough with us, saying, "Alright, these are our orders...
...I hadn't seen those women in 40 years, and I broke down and cried...
...We were part of the new CIO, and those initials were like G-O-D to us then...
...Now, when the UAW got its local newspaper going, [CP member] Henry Kraus came in...
...They had their members primarily in Buick up in the North End...
...We organized the Brigade at mass meetings of the Auxiliary...
...He sure edited things the way he wanted to...
...A: That's when we started having meetings in homes—secret meetings, because General Motors was a very dangerous customer...
...In this building were the offices of the Proletarian party, the Socialist Labor party, the Socialist party, and the Lovestoneites [a small leftwing group that had left the Communist party in the late 1920s...
...Kermit Johnson, my husband, was the union leader there...
...I could never find any old socialists of that period...
...We had political discussions and workers' education classes...
...I asked the women, "Break through the police lines and come down here and stand with us, with your husbands and brothers...
...A key figure in the Flint strike was the 23-year-old Genora Johnson—now Genora Dollinger—who during the course of the strike founded and led first the UAW's Women's Auxiliary and then the Women's Emergency Brigade...
...So after the battle, we decided to organize the women into the Women's Emergency Brigade— an organization without any elections, just assigned squads...
...Our slogan at the time was, When We Get the Signal, Move...
...They and the SLP said that labor unions were the labor lieutenants of capitalism...
...Q: None of the people who had been in the Brigade as far as you know ever had any kind of institutional role...
...He said, we've got nothing to lose...
...They teargassed and beat those men bloody...
...Victor Reuther, the primary speaker on the sound car that night, told me the batteries were running down...
...Q: In April 1936, the UAW had its real founding convention in South Bend...
...They became active in the strike primarily because people were sent in from the outside...
...That's when I decided to organize the women into an auxiliary...
...Two were from Fisher Body and one was from AC Spark Plug...
...That was the thing that saved the battle...
...I said you had to be willing to hold hands with your sister, and she might go down in blood, but you couldn't be the type of woman to faint away...
...You could get beaten up walking home or in a beer garden if you talked union in the shop...
...So we stayed there, and I sent one lieutenant to call the union for help...
...Then the workers inside the plant finished their barricading...
...There was a great deal of tension between the Socialists and the Communists—but locally we were all mainly interested in the Pinkertons and the goons they sent in to beat us up...
...Well, the best women in the Brigade for action were the Lovestoneite women who did come out of a similar experience, and a few of the Socialist-party women built the Auxiliary, set up the first-aid station, the children's nursery, and classes...
...You see, the women just came out of their homes and then they evaporated right back into them and became grandmothers...
...But the women in AC, which was the only big plant employing women, were never pulled out on strike...
...It's a huge thing to barricade, that Plant Four...
...ers and police], the men ushered the women and children to safety...
...After a time, it was clear the battle was going badly...
...Genora Johnson, a native of Flint, was an active member of the Socialist party, as was Kermit Johnson, then her husband, who was the leader of the UAW's Chevrolet workers in Flint...
...It was down for 14 days, and then General Motors signed a contract...
...So the police were waiting there...
...My lieutenants and I just sauntered casually around the corner and down Chevrolet Avenue to Plant Four to see how things were going...
...you'd wind up in the hospital the next day...
...But when it came to the Brigade, I had two Fisher Body workers, both of them out of the South originally...
...These women came down to the plants to threaten their husbands: we're going to go without food, without heat, they said, so you come out by New Year's Eve or you'll have a divorce...
...But they refused...
...But they had educated their people about class struggle and so they took active roles...
...When they finally decided to take the plant, Walter and Roy and Kermit worked very closely together...
...A: Prior to the strike, we didn't know the CP members...
...I didn't know where the heck else to go...
...The first woman started down, and the police grabbed her by the coat, but she pulled away and started coming down...
...They could have settled at any time...
...When I was about 16, we formed the Flint branch of the Socialist party...
...In recent years she has been active in the peace movement, and she was featured in a documentary film on the Women's Emergency Brigade, With Babies and Banners...
...the cotton factory strikes...
...They were having a rough time, throwing out the scabs, fighting inside the plant...
...A: A small minority...
...I didn't ask the men because I knew what would happen to them...
...So we had to have very clandestine meetings then, and that's when we started discussing and making plans...
...A: In 1912 or 1913, Flint had elected a Debsian socialist mayor...
...The Proletarian party laid a lot of the groundwork in Fisher Body—Clayton Carpenter and his brother Clarence—and you didn't read about them anywhere...
...A whole contingent of police came marching down Chevrolet Avenue and there were five of us against the main gate...
...Q: Did your lieutenants in the Brigade or any of the women who were on the line ever subsequently play a role in their locals, as officers or organizers...
...Practically all of them were from the South...
...he said it was too dangerous, the whole national strategy would be jeopardized...
...It was important that there were political union leaders in Flint who were helping what was really a big general strike...
...I'd just seen Fred Stevens of the Transportation Workers jump over a little ditch and the water turned red and blood spurted out of his leg...
...We signed up between 400 and 500 women in the brigade alone...
...The other plants didn't employ women, just a very small number at Fisher One...
...The people that first built the nucleus of the strike were primarily people who had gone through Roy's classes...
...I went into several mass meetings of the men and I appealed to them to have their wives and sisters and aunts come to the next meeting...
...we said, "Over our dead bodies, you go in there...
...Q: Did the rest of the Brigade leadership come out of a political background like yours...
...They were too intimidated...
...And other women came...
...I think they were kind of tired, too, to tell the truth...
...They held a "secret" meeting where they let the stool pigeons know we were going to take Plant Nine...
...That was shortly after January 1. At the start of the Battle of Running Bulls [a January 11 battle outside the plants between strik(Continued on next page...
...They went to push us aside...
...We had a 16-year-old granddaughter of a striker and a 72-year-old grandmother who came out of the copper country...
...On February 11, the company capitulated and recognized the UAW as the bargaining agent for its workers...
...General Motors was appealing to them by radio, and we had no means of getting to them: most workers didn't have telephones then...
...On December 30, 1936, United Auto Workers militants sat in at General Motors' Fisher Body plants One and Two...
...We've got instructions too and we've got to go in...
...For instance, all public transportation was down, and the leader of that effort was Fred Stevens, who was a member of the Socialist party...
...During World War II, she was a UAW militant at Detroit's Briggs plant...
...The police had just been notified...
...I set up a circular picket line to keep the police out, and it would have been real bloody warfare if they had done anything at that point...
...The Communist party had contacts up in the northern part of Flint in the Russian and Polish communities, but we didn't know too much about them...
Vol. 32 • September 1985 • No. 4
