Carlton Jackson’s Child of the Sit-Downs
by Louis Proyect
Book Review
Jackson, Carlton: Child of the Sit-Downs: the Revolutionary Life of
Genora Dollinger, Kent State University Press, Kent, Ohio, 2008 ISBN
978-0-87338-944-0, 216 pages.
(Swans - October 6, 2008) Carlton Jackson’s Child of the Sit-Downs: the
Revolutionary Life of Genora Dollinger is a valuable addition to the
ongoing history of the American left. The book is not just worth reading
for its account of Genora Dollinger’s heroic intervention into the 1937
Flint sit-down strike, the struggle that she is best known for. It will
also help long-time leftists figure out how to cope with and even rise
above difficult times in American society through her example. The
radicalizations of the 1930s and the 1960s were spearheaded by young
people and when they subsided, new navigation skills had to be learned
in order to cope with a society that had returned to a “normalcy” of
racism, imperialist war, class oppression, and alienation. As Carlton
Jackson makes clear, Genora Dollinger mastered these skills with
uncommon intelligence and a burning idealism that lasted until her death
in 1995 at the age of 82.
Despite his academic background (he is now a professor emeritus at
Western Kentucky State), Carlton Jackson has written an extremely
readable book so much so that I missed my bus stop the other day as I
turned the pages to see how Genora and her husband Sol were coping with
1950s repression. Jackson has also written biographies of Hattie
McDaniel, the famous African-American actress, and Martin Ritt, the
liberal film director. Being able to see the contributions of the
Hollywood left and labor activists alike is of course a gift that is
shared by Paul Buhle, another academic who has learned to speak directly
to the ordinary person.
One of the most eye-opening aspects of Child of the Sit-Downs is its
account of how its subject radicalized in the 1930s. It turns out that
the Methodist Church in her hometown of Flint had a lot to do with
Genora’s evolution. Sunday School gave her an opportunity to learn about
the Social Gospel ideas of Josiah Strong, Walter Rauschenbusch, and
other reformers who believed that government should help the poor. With
her rebellious streak, Genora soon found herself taking the opposite
stance of her father Raymond Albro, who had become relatively prosperous
in the photography business and a racist to boot. He had joined the KKK
in keeping with Malcolm X’s observation that everything south of Canada
was the South.
At the age of 17, Genora fell in love with and got married to Kermit
Johnson, a boy she met in Sunday school. Kermit’s father Carl had been a
“prairie populist” before finding work at the Chevrolet plant in Flint
and soon became a member of the Socialist Party. Kermit brought Genora
to party meetings where she heard his father and other socialists
discuss the Molly McGuires, the Knights of Labor and the Brotherhood of
Sleeping Car Porters, and other insurgent labor movements. In no time at
all, her Christian idealism transformed into the socialist beliefs that
she held for the rest of her life. As Carlton Jackson recounts:
"Always the most religious member of the Albro family, she taught Sunday
school at the Methodist church and participated in church socials and
singing events. While confined to bed during her bouts with TB, she read
everything she could find about the world’s religions. She wanted to
know how and why religions were created. She read lives of Zoroaster,
Christ, Mohammed, and the Buddha, and she studied Baha-ism. Steadily she
came to realize that the founders of the world’s great religions were
simple - not simplistic - people who created beliefs that were
noncomplicated. Later, these religions were institutionalized to include
beliefs and requirements that had nothing to do with the founders. Human
beings created dogma, she reckoned, and dogma was not a perfect
persuader. Interspersed with her religious readings was Genora’s study
of the various Socialist movements in the world. As she read Marx,
Lenin, and Trotsky and learned of women labor reformers such as Rose
Pesotta, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Rose Schneidermann, and Rose Pastor
Stokes, she discovered totally different religious and philosophical
worlds from the comfortable one in which she grew up. When she read and
heard about the events of the day, including so much labor unrest at GM
and elsewhere throughout the country, she began to see what in her own
mind was the hardboiled capitalist attitude of management toward labor.
Accordingly, she plunged herself into the Socialist activities of the time."
full: http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2008/10/06/child-of-the-sit-downs/
_______________________________________________
pen-l mailing list
[email protected]
https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
