The Studs Terkel Reader_My American Century

by Studs Terkel

  When you’re a CEO, my goodness, you’re at the office at eight o’clock. You have meetings going on, correspondence, phone, this guy calls you, that guy calls you, planning for a board meeting, people problems, manufacturing problems. And they need somebody for a final decision.

  Your social circle has diminished by the deaths. Mostly what’s left of your social world are the widows. [Chuckles.] You read the obituaries by habit now.87

  As for politics, I’ve become a cynical old man. I don’t believe in miracles anymore. I don’t believe anybody walks on water. It’s kind of a hopeless feeling. There’s a lot to be done, but I don’t think it can ever be done because the people will never allow it. I don’t think the human species has changed since it was created. The horrors of centuries ago are still happening today. What have we learned? The human failing. And the CEO is no different than the rest of us.

  In my opinion, the world is in a worse mess than it’s ever been. I know it’s been said of every generation, but this time it’s really true. I wasn’t this cynical when I was younger. I thought we were helping save the world. I have no regrets for those feelings.

  I envy the young their rage but not their future. I think they’re in for some rough times. You see it in their daily lives. A small percentage of young executives will hit the top and make far more money than we did. But there will be far less opportunities for the majority. The great middle class is going to be less and less. There will be extreme wealth and extreme poverty. I hope I’m completely wrong. I’d be the happiest guy in the world, even if I’m not around. Personally, I look forward to some years of health, and when my time comes, to go immediately.

  GENORA JOHNSON DOLLINGER, 80

  Now living in Los Angeles, she became something of a legend during the first sit-down strike of 1937.

  “I’d like very much to continue with the work I’ve done all my life, but my bad health pens me in as a prisoner. I’m not too generous about that. I chafe at the bit.

  “My difficulties are mainly cardiac. I’m on my third pacemaker. It’s often out of function, out of rhythm, and use only half of my heart. It takes down my spirits considerably.

  “I would like to get out and participate in any effort, no matter how weak I may be. I’ve been active in the labor movement, the civil rights movement, the peace movement, all my life.”

  I was raised in Flint, Michigan. My family were pioneers in the city when Billy Durant was first experimenting in auto making. My father was a good, law-abiding citizen with all the prejudices of that day. He felt that women were not the equal of men. He was definitely middle class. He started out as a photographer for Buick, and made enough money to have a string of photographic shops throughout the state. He became very well-to-do. My mother, who was from a poor family, was always for the underdog, but she couldn’t understand her daughter getting out, being a rebel.

  While I was still in high school, a classmate invited me to her home, where I met her father and her brother. Her father was a very learned man who was something of a Eugene Debs socialist. He became my father-in-law, a man I always loved and admired very much. I called him Dad. I disliked my own father because he was so bigoted and narrow.

  Things got so oppressive at home that I ran away and got married. I was seventeen. In my eyes, I was just escaping prison. My young husband got a job at Chevrolet and became an auto worker. Flint, aside from Ford’s independent work, is where the auto industry began to grow. General Motors, DuPont, corporate power. Of course, there was no job security, no nothing.

  By this time, I’d joined the Socialist Party and we were holding pretty large meetings in the center of the town. I was becoming very well known among the auto workers. I was not treated as just a woman but as someone who could join the battle.

  By this time, I was pretty well known by the Flint police, too, and the company goons—and by some of the GM big shots. They tried to stop me through my father. My uncle was vice-president of General Motors, in charge of Chevrolet production. He had given jobs to some of my cousins. My father was closely connected to GM in many ways. They cut off all his transactions, all his photographic business, all his properties.

  He tried to evict us from the apartment we had rented from him. We had two little boys at the time. My mother helped me get the children fed while I was at the union headquarters. My father and I never, never got along.

  When the strike broke out in Fisher Tool, we were there. The big Chevrolet compound of factories was directly across the street and we were there, too. We were right in the middle of it from the very beginning. We sat down on the twenty-eighth and twenty-ninth of December, 1936, just before New Year’s Day.

  General Motors had complete control of all the means of communication in the city—the newspapers, the radio. They were putting out propaganda that the Communists were taking over Flint. The women were frightened to death because we’d gone through a long depression, a slim, hard existence. They believed much of what General Motors was saying. On New Year’s Eve, I saw a contingent of women coming down to the plant threatening their husbands: “You get out of that plant and be with me on New Year’s Eve or I’m starting divorce against you Monday morning.”

  There were a couple of divorces that were played up in the press. This was a big factor to weaken the resolve of the men who were just beginning the sit-down strike. Remember, we were just a handful against the biggest industrial corporation in the world. We knew we had to make some move. Well, I decided what my purpose was: to get the women organized, women talking to women.

  We put out leaflets announcing that the women were organizing, to come down and join up—and bring other women. They didn’t have cars and few had telephones at that time. You had to reach them door to door. For the first time in labor history, we organized a Women’s Auxiliary. A lot of people thought the name wasn’t very nice, that it should have been “Ladies Auxiliary” as the wives of craft union members were called.

  We did everything. Mainly, it was to get women to understand why their husbands were taking the big chance. We visited their homes, organized a nursery for the children, a first aid station with a registered nurse. They organized the kitchen that fed the strikers hundreds of meals a day. We’d just walk across the street where the men were sitting in, they’d open the window and we’d push in cartons of food. We were protected by the picket lines that were there all the time.

  General Motors would start rumors that somebody’s mother or father was dying and that the man should come right home. We were losing a few people that way. But as soon as the wives understood what was being done, they’d send in messages that things were all right at home, to stick in there.

  We had a few friendly merchants and farmer neighbors and auto workers who had farms. They’d send in bags of potatoes and sides of beef. We had a welfare committee going around soliciting everybody for food. 88

  The battle began when General Motors hired some goons and ordered the Flint police to throw the workers out of Fisher Tool. They were afraid that if the sit-down continued, it would spread to the fifteen other GM plants across the country. So they started tear-gassing. We formed a great big picket line in front of the plant and the men turned over their own cars to make a barricade.

  The police were using buckshots and rifles and tear gas and everything against us. The men were throwing back whatever they could get their hands on: nuts and bolts and hinges. Any tear-gas bomb that came over unexploded, they’d throw back into the ranks of the police.

  Whenever a woman appeared, the men would courteously escort them to safety. They wanted to escort me away and I said, “Hell, no. I have as many weapons as you have. I’m staying right here.” So I stayed the whole night while the battle raged. When the fight was at its height, Victor Reuther, who had been on the sound truck, encouraging the people to keep on going, came over to us and said, “The batteries are running down. We may lose this battle, but we won’t lose the war.” I said, “How about my getting on that
truck?” Women never were on the sound car. The men thought they had to win everything. He said, “We’ve got nothing to lose.” So I got on and tried a new tactic—an appeal to the women.

  On each side of these barricades there were thousands of men and women who had come to see what was going on. Naturally, the radio, controlled by GM, made it sound like the revolution had broken out. The sound car was reaching them. On the loudspeaker, on top of the truck, I directed my remarks to the women on both sides of the barricades. I said the cops were shooting into the bellies of unarmed men and the mothers of children. I made it sound as though there were an equal number of women down there. I begged the women to break through those lines of cops and come down here and join with us.

  One woman started forward and a cop grabbed her coat. She pulled right out of it and marched down to join us. After that, other women came. The police didn’t want to shoot them in the back. The women poured through and that ended the battle. I was smack dab in the middle.

  But that wasn’t the greatest moment. The biggest victory was the strategy that involved breaking the windows of one plant as a ruse, to make the corporation feel that that was the plant we were going to pull down on strike. This decoy was Chevrolet Plant No. 9. All the plant police and city cops rushed over there.

  I had the women’s emergency brigade marching up and down with clubs. When the company goons started attacking the men inside, one worker with a bloody face broke a window and shouted, “They’re tear-gassing us inside.” We flew at the windows and broke them out.

  While this fight was going on at No. 9, and up until the time they carried the men out in ambulances and took them to the hospital, the men in Plant No. 4 were busy building barricades. This was the plant GM couldn’t operate without. It produced all the motors of every Chevrolet car across the country. Their best seller.

  My first husband, Kermit Johnson, was the only member of the strike committee working in that plant. It employed four thousand. He had a tiny piece of scrap paper that marked out all the exits, sliding doors, gondolas, and everything. The guys from all the other Chevrolet plants came pouring into Plant No. 4 and held it in a sit-down.

  So while they were carrying the guys out in ambulances at the decoy plant, No. 9, I and four lieutenants strolled down to No. 4. We came to the gate and the guys inside were yelling, “Fbr God’s sake, don’t let anyone through that gate.” They were throwing out the scabs and all kinds of fighting was going on inside.

  We five string ourselves across that iron gate entry. The Flint police came marching up to us: “All right, out of the way. We’re going in.” We said, “Over our dead bodies.” One of the young women said, “My father and my brother work here and nobody is going in. If you were working here, your wife would do the same thing.”

  The five of us women held out, stalling the police. Beating an unarmed woman was a different story in those days. We looked up and here came the emergency brigade, the Red Berets. We called ourselves that because of our red berets, red arm bands with white letters: EB. They were carrying the American flag and singing “Solidarity Forever” and “Hold the Fort.” The sound car came, I hopped on it, and we organized the big picket line at the gate.

  That was the single biggest victory of the labor movement. Fifteen plants across the country were on strike, but No. 4 was the plant that settled the whole business. We shut this one down for fourteen days. It was part of the forty-four-day strike in the other two Fisher body plants. It was tougher here because we had no cushions or upholstery for sitting down.

  We won. Our union was recognized. GM decided to sit down with us. John L. Lewis came in and they conducted negotiations in Detroit. The guys in the plant couldn’t believe it. They were struck with astonishment.89 Celebration? When the guys evacuated the plant, the whole town was reveling. I was smothered in the crowds of people filling the streets, marching through the city, singing and dancing all night long. I was twenty-three.

  That period was the high point of my life. It was the time of the Depression, when working people had a feeling for each other. We helped each other out in times of trouble. It was a time that most people never get a chance to live through. We started to organize against hunger, poverty, sickness, everything that’s hard. We were just at the point where so many of us decided we’d rather die first before we’d ever go back to being nonunion scabs. A little different from today, I’m afraid.

  I was blacklisted by every employer in Flint. They wouldn’t touch me with a ten-foot pole. So we moved to Detroit. I got a job at Briggs. I was fired from the one before. They caught up with me before I got in my ninety days to be eligible for seniority.

  At Briggs, I became one of the leaders of the most militant UAW local: 212. We were known as the Dead End Kids. This company still could not accept the union, so we went on strike frequently. I had taken a WPA training course in lathes and machinery, so they put me on a punch press. I thought I’d die because, by this time, I was left with one lung. I had tuberculosis at the time of the GM strike.

  They offered me a job in the front office, hiring people. I said, “Of course not. The war is on and I want to do my part on the line.” So I became head of the blueprint inspection department.

  The girls were having a hard time with these macho foremen, who were saying horrible things to them, penalizing them at every chance. They didn’t want women in the plant. In that new department , I didn’t dare open my mouth for ninety days. About three days before the ninety days were up, the girls invited me to a union meeting. So I thought I’d sit in the back and not say a word.

  The main speaker at the meeting was Emil Mazy, one of the original UAW organizers. Halfway through his speech, he looked out and recognized me. He said, “I don’t know why you women are asking us for help. You’ve got one of the original UAW organizers sitting back there.”

  I said, “Emil, you just cooked my goose. I was just three days away from seniority.” Emil said, “I want you and all these women to know that if they fire Genora, every Briggs plant in Detroit will go down.” They did fire me, and eighteen thousand workers went on strike. Every Briggs plant went down. They took me back on the job.

  I began to hold public speaking classes in the local, training people to get up and challenge contracts that were bad. Rank-and-file people. I became very active in our caucus. Our militant people were getting beaten up regularly. One of our best men suffered a brain concussion. Another was terribly beaten up while walking down the street with his wife. They were obviously professional jobs.

  We formed an investigating committee to find out who was behind it. We suspected the Mafia and we were right. I was the only woman on that committee. When the Reuther brothers got shot and wounded—Vie lost an eye—the UAW hired a guy who had worked with the LaFollette Committee to work for them. 90

  Meanwhile, we’re investigating on our own. One night, someone enters our bedroom with a lead pipe, clubs my husband and cracks me over the head. I wound up paralyzed down the whole side of my body. I was in the hospital for God knows how long.

  We discovered that the son of the Mafia head in Detroit had a great big contract with Briggs for all the scrap metal. You see, we were getting too close. That’s when they came and did the job on us.

  Now the war was over and the plants were being transferred back to civilian production. They laid off a great many women. The boys were back, you can now return to the kitchen.

  Years later, in the ’60s, I became active in the antiwar movement. I worked for the American Civil Liberties Union in Detroit. We had a very militant chapter. When they returned to California in 1966, I became interested in schools. I was organizing community advisory councils and appearing before boards. We played a big role in the first teachers’ strike out here. There was the National Organization for Women, of course. I even signed up my granddaughter, when she was five months old.

  I had to give all this up about three years ago, when my illness caught up with me. It’s something you can
’t control. It’s gotten worse and worse. I get so disgusted. At one point, my doctor suggested that I have a wheel chair. It’s out in the garage. It belongs in a museum. I can’t stand the thought of it. But I think that’s where I’m heading, because only half my heart is functioning. I don’t know anything that’s okay with me right now! Oh, how I’d love to be back in action. It’s been my whole life. But nature takes us all down.

  It’s not just my health, it’s the health of our country that’s so bad. Anybody who was at the birth of the CIO and went through all those upheavals must feel disillusioned, discouraged, and disgusted with present-day labor leadership. They think the back door to the White House is the way. Labor is in for some pretty dark days.

  How can we reach the young? We’ve got to get a political party that addresses education, training, the needs of working people, and the four-day workweek. The first UAW meeting in Milwaukee called for a thirty-hour workweek with forty hours’ pay. I’m pessimistic for the near future, but I think, someday, leaders will arise worthy of the American working class.

  Old people, my generation, are being ripped off with a medical system that’s stealing money out of their pockets left and right. The prescriptions alone, for me, run over three hundred dollars a month. How can people who receive only Social Security benefits pay for something like that? In a minute, I’ll be taking one of those pills.

  Any regrets? Second thoughts? Maybe I should have spent more time with the two young children I lost. Two wonderful kids, who were killed by a speeding taxi cab. One was ten, the other was fourteen. Sometimes you think, “Oh, my God, maybe I should have spent more time at home with them.” They had such a short life. The kids in the classroom had new bikes and our kids didn’t. I used to explain that we were doing it for everybody’s children. They agreed with me, but they had to sacrifice a hell of a lot. Some things you can’t help. I don’t know. If I hadn’t gone through all these experiences, I wouldn’t be the same person. Other people helped make me what I am.