Genora: (Vincent R. Dunne and Carl Skoglund) had been workers all of their lives in Minneapolis. They came from Minneapolis to Flint and they talked so convincingly. We talked about how to educate the worker and how to recruit the worker. They talked in terms of truck drivers and other workers that were around the labor movement there. Even though their strike was not as significant as ours was, nevertheless, it was one of the forerunners; and the women had played a very extensive role there, too, on a different level, they were still under the guidance and direction of the men in the strike, but they played an important role.
Sherna: Were they trying to recruit just you or Kermit as well and your whole group. Was their focus primarily on you?
Genora: Oh, they knew whatever I did would probably have a lot of effect in the SP. But their tactics after that were very poor. I’ll tell you why(They urged us to leave the SP before we had time to convince the rest of the Flint members to follow our lead.) They asked would we please come to Minneapolis? We had no money and they offered to pay.
I remember going over on a boat. I was seasick all night long. We drove to Minneapolis and met Grace Carlson, a very personable person who later ran for vice-president of the United States. She told me her story of her break with the Catholic Church, and her coming over to the Minneapolis Trotskyists. She talked in workers language even though she had never worked in a factory.
Sherna: I think she had a Phd. In something or another.
Genora: Yes, she was Dr. Grace Carlson and seemed like a very stable person. After that she went back to the church and to her husband.
Sherna: When you say "we" when you went to Minneapolis...
Genora: Kermit went with me.
Sherna: Did Carl Johnson go, too?
Genora: No.
Sherna: You and Kermit.
Genora: Yes, Kermit and I. Carl Johnson was a dyed-in-the-wool idealist. He was in the Clarity group but never had any factionalism in his mind between the Clarity group and the Thomasites. Norman Thomas was the man representing socialism in America. Carl Johnson didn’t even want to read the factional literature. He was a great reader, too. He read the papers, but he thought the whole issue of bringing the problem of the Soviet union over here was a divisive thing in the American Working class.
Sherna: So you and Kermit went.
Genora: Yes, we went. And of course they had a very active Socialist group; they had very large meetings. They had a very large Socialist headquarters. Each person, was a worker, that I admired, because they were on a much higher level of political activity having been years in the labor movement and not having been quite so isolated in a small town like we were. So I was impressed with all of the people I met there. You know, the big tall Hank Schultz, from the electrical union, and other workers that came, and I thought, oh, this is what we should have. They were very honest people; they were not like Walter Reuther, who felt that he was labor’s elite and he didn’t want to be controlled at all from the ranks of the Socialist Party. He didn’t want anybody in the party to instruct him. In Minneapolis they were already well-known and leaders in their own right yet you could see in a meeting we attended, that the guy who set the chairs, and his name was Oscar Coover, had as much to say in that meeting, and his opinions were as respected as anybody else’s. So we were very, very impressed. When we came back we decided perhaps that we might be able to work better with people like that, than with people who made decisions without consultation with those expected to carry them out. I was already disillusioned with Walter Reuther, of course.
Sherna: You and Kermit seemed to see eye to eye on this.
Genora: Yes. When I say that I was disappointed, disillusioned, Kermit was too. Because he felt very, very strongly about the worker having a right to talk to the top leader and especially after Walter Reuther had made some beautiful statements of how he believed no official of any union , that included the garment workers, miners and all the established unions, should ever be paid more than the highest skilled worker in the industry. Kermit and I felt very strongly that Reuther wasn’t acting the way he was speaking at that point, even though we were in the same caucus. So we decided that perhaps the Minneapolis Trotskyists were right; they had a marvelous trade union program in Minneapolis and nationally and the militancy, although it seemed alien in some of its language, (and I never got over that feeling entirely)—we decided to join. They became insistent as Kermit and I later learned, they wanted to use this nationally that Kermit, auto union strike leader and Genora Johnson, leader of the Women’s Emergency Brigade had come over to the Socialist Workers Party. They were using this to bring other workers out of the SP across the country, and to recruit. The SWP made the announcements far too soon, because we could have taken every member of the Flint Socialist Party had they and others given us the time.
Sherna: Well, you came back from Minneapolis and started talking within your own Socialist party group.
Genora: Yes, but the SWP announcement was made too soon and the SP members hesitated, and again they were hit by this Trotskyite label. "Why do you say we’re Trotskyites," instead of socialists. This was a fight that happened before preparation and we lost. They were not on a level of Marxist reading that we were. With Carl Johnson remaining firm, as a Norman Thomas follower, the people that I had recruited who were then working very actively in the union—they knew what it meant to have a label like a Trotskyist or Stalinist pinned on you. When we went into the SWP we did not bring over more than Kermit’s brother Eugene who was just a good guy, would go anywhere his brother and sister-in-law said, and a couple of other people, couldn’t have been very important, I would have remembered. Then we started recruiting for the SWP.
Sherna: When you formed the nucleus there were other people already in the party in Flint or were you the beginning of it, in other words?
Genora: Oh yes, we started it.
Sherna: Was there animosity on the part of the SP people who didn’t lean toward you and Kermit?
Genora: Only one, and this was the young man who I turned over the sign painting department to when we were organizing during the strike. I recruited him into the SP. His name was Bruce Sloan. Bruce was broken-hearted, he was so hurt and bitter and wrote a letter to the SP national office saying good riddance. But the rest of them, no, they were never hostile. They were hurt, terribly hurt. It was bad tactics, and I don’t know why it was announced that way. I don’t know if I had any control over it. I don’t remember how it happened, but it was bad tactics. We didn’t bring over the people but we did recruit a lot of people later.
Sherna: From what kind of groups were they recruited?
Genora: Sol was in the Socialist Workers Party in New York and Sol and Kermit just met auto workers and he recruited some very fine influential people. Not only that. later on he went back to Flint the second time. He established an enlarged and effective branch of the SWP. Sol was full time as the Flint organizer.
Sherna: But earlier, when you and Kermit first started the SWP, you were recruiting primarily from Auto workers?
Genora: Yes, we were recruiting new people.
Sherna: It sounds like the WPA thing was a part of the building also.
Genora: Yes, Roy Lawrence, Claude Workman And Robert Carter, who later became the Flint City Manager, we brought into our orbit, the SWP orbit; they were members.
Sherna: Then, until the WPA organizing, how many of you would there have been?
Genora: How many until the WPA? Oh, Patrick Murray and his son, Ed Beckwith, lets see, about ten or twelve. Because of our union activities, unemployed and WPA activities the Homer Martin fight, and everything else, we didn’t have the chance to sit down and educate them, go through the whole business of the labor movement and the Socialist movement. You see we only had a little period of preparation prior to the big WPA and Unemployed demonstrations. We’d meet together in small meetings and do what we could but most of our discussions would go right over into present day emergency problems.
Sherna: So there was this period between 1938 and the WPA organizing in 1939 where you were just building this group and still involved in the UAW, until the big layoffs in auto and the WPA period.
Genora: Yes.
Sherna: Now, Genora, when was the Michigan Commonwealth Federation? Was this quite a bit later?
Genora: This was when Sol and I were in Detroit, so that came later, about 1944. We were advocating building of a labor party—well I think from the beginning.
Sherna: You’re in the WPA, and you’re both in the SWP at this point. When was Kermit laid off from his job at GM in this period and went into the WPA? Do You recall?
Genora: No I don’t recall. I think that we could look it up somewhere. I think that all of Chevrolet went down for war production. I’m not sure if that happened at Fisher, because they went into the production of tanks and at Chevrolet. I can’t remember whether it was jeeps.
Sherna: Because at first it seems like it was March, April of 1939 that the WPA union began, and i was just wondering if this was a plan for Kermit to go into WPA section to organize the local or what was the actual sequence and how the organizing began.
Genora: No, it developed very naturally. He was laid-off in the natural process according to his seniority. And you see because of his youth he didn’t have high seniority in the plant so he would be among the first to be laid off. Then the natural thing was to go on unemployment— we didn’t have any benefits then from the union, naturally, We went on relief because there were no other jobs, Flint was a one industry town. WPA was opening work projects to take you off relief. This was a natural and very normal development.
With the Workers Alliance beginning to attract people, we didn’t feel they had the answers to the very crucial problem. This is when the UAW International set up a department. Now, they never pushed that because I think they understood that it was a temporary thing much more than we did. We weren’t sure, we’d been in the depression period in this one-industry town for so long, and we felt it so deeply that we weren’t sure of the duration. So we went at it hammer and tongs when we organized the unemployed.
Sherna: At this point you were living on relief.
Genora: Yes, we were for a short period of time before he got on a WPA project.
Sherna: You are still living at your parents’ apartment building?
Genora: I thinks so, But I am not sure about that, there were other places were we lived also. That’s getting kind of hard to remember now.
I do know this also that when the UAW set up its WPA locals to organize the men on the jobs— these were auto workers that had been organized in the 1937 strike. They wanted to keep representing them, showing them the value of organization, unionization; they were not crazy about having to be unemployed. There are in every city a certain number of relief cases who preferred to be on relief. These few will always be with you. We felt the problems of were interrelated that you could not exclude the unemployed from the union. Now the WPA workers had to pay something like twenty five cents a month dues, some very small amount. But it was significant as far as operating a union hall and running off leaflets and things like that. The unemployed had to pay nothing as far as the union was concerned. We were operating at a loss when you had to put out leaflets to reach the unemployed also. We felt that the problems of the unemployed and WPA and the factory workers were interlinked. That was our distinct role in the city of Flint
The Workers Alliance separated the unemployed and WPA from the employed auto workers. They didn’t try to tie it up with the UAW demands. It was done from the WA headquarters. Nationally they were a big unemployed organization, no question about it. Their procedure always came from headquarters all the way down.
The original impetus for organizing the WPA workers actually came from the UAW leadership, within Flint anyhow.
It was from rank and file pressure in the UAW that set up this department within the UAW. As soon as we had our group meeting, always we were...Sherna I can’t explain this to you because there’s been nothing like this since. Always there were meetings going on —Whether our small Socialist group or like thinkers, or a big poker party or whatever—there were group meetings. Maybe, not the same groups all the time; so we had messages, communications from the strike days and many of the guys would meet together in the beer gardens. I never particularly liked them. They were noisy, smoky places but often I would go along with them. We would sit until the long hours of the morning, discussing unionism, that was all we were thinking about. As soon as we heard of the UAW department is when we decided we wanted to get the official title. We wanted to tie together what we had been discussing and how we had been operating. We had never gone to the Workers Alliance. Some of our people had gone up to see about it. But as soon as the UAW had an umbrella that we could operate under, this is what we wanted.
Sherna: Now, by "we", who do you mean.
Genora: I mean the workers at Buick, Chevrolet, Fisher, and the other plants. Friendships were formed and groups were formed during the period of the strike in the Pengelly building.
Sherna: Because there was a reference in the recounting of history of that local to a half dozen militants who would really work on organizing it early, I was wondering who those people were, and were all of those people tied to the SWP at that point in the beginning of the organization?
Genora: It must have been, yes. Claude Workman was from Buick, No, we didn’t meet Claude Workman until the WPA, he was out on some project. But perhaps, by the time the UAW set up maybe—I think Kermit was already on a WPA project. This is where they meet them, on their projects, too. Pat Murray was on a project. You know what these projects were. They were making streets, digging ditches. They called it boondoggling. All these men really worked with pick and shovel. The work project might be a very large component of men; these were all males on these kinds of jobs. When that job was finished, half would go over here, perhaps twenty blocks away another half would go to the other side of the city. These people kept together because of their need to discuss their problems.
Every one of them, in one way or another had been in the 1937 strike situation. Claude Workman, from Buick, his plant was never on strike but had previous strike experience in the Illinois miners union. He was down on the picket lines and knew Kermit Johnson and me, We were the focal point of getting all these people.
We had this apartment and people would come up very often just to talk on Saturday night. "I’ve got a problem," and we’d get a couple of bottles of beer. We had to collect something that you turned in—was it milk bottles?— that you got two cents for a return—sometimes to get a couple of bottles of beer. We just had no money, we had had to collect milk bottles and all kinds of things and pool them in order to get a beverage to drink to sit around and talk.
Sherna: As the men with a strike background started working on the WPA projects and the UAW was recognizing the need to keep a kind of spirited unionism—this local or auxiliary was set up.
Genora: The pressure came from the ranks of the UAW. That’s the main point that I do remember.
Sherna: From the beginning was it set up with a steward system and all the rest or did that evolve later?
Genora: This was the natural pattern because that was the way the UAW was operating. You see, we had a stewards system in the plants at that time. Naturally we appointed a man as a steward on every single work project around the city.
Sherna: Now what proportion would you think actually joined the local. Do you recall what the figures were?
Genora: I don’t. I know that many of them felt they couldn’t pay the twenty five cent a month, I think it was, or was it a week,? They just thought they couldn’t pay the dues, and whenever they would call a strike on a project—- and of course they did this in order to get job conditions—or whatever was necessary—the men would sit down to a man, even if they couldn’t afford to drive into meetings of this union or pay the dues. I don’t know of any that were actually scabs on the job. Within the organization we had a couple of men who stood out in my mind. One was elected first president, a little guy by the name of Ed Weber and another by the name of Joseph Duprey. Somehow they were contacted by city officials and other people making them feel a little prominent. They were used within our union to hold down militancy. At one point Joseph Duprey, who I was very suspicious of, and from more than one angle, tried to expel Roy Lawrence and me. I thought Kermit was expelled at the time ,too, but I can’t remember.
Sherna: But, that would be into 1940 then.
Genora: Yes, but the point that I’m making is that the men on the job, whether they belonged to the union or not, really felt that they were a part of whatever action was called upon. That’s why we had leaflets going out every single week, and sometimes more than that, if it was an emergency situation or we had something special.
Sherna: So there were stewards on each project. And the local would print up leaflets which the stewards distributed on the job.
Genora: Yes, we would have somebody in a car go around and give a batch to each steward and they would distribute them on the job.
Sherna: So this was, at this point in the organizing, still with the blessings of the UAW.
Genora: Yes.
Sherna: And it was the group of militants, though, who forced it to be UAW-WPA and Unemployed?
Genora: Yes, of course, we made the decision. I don’t know what they did in other WPA locals. Again, we had our hands full; it’s not easy to communicate when you haven’t got the money for telephoning and you haven’t got time for writing letters. Joe Pagano didn’t come into Flint until he decided we were a little too militant. We went down to Detroit to see him one time because he was sending letters up to Flint making impossible demands that weren’t related to the situation.
Sherna: Was the incorporation of the unemployed in the local partially as a response to what the Workers Alliance was doing, and their attempt to recruit among the unemployed?
Genora: It may have been. But again you see, the man who was unemployed was just waiting to get on a project on WPA. If injured on WPA he could be back unemployed. If he had sisters or brothers and other family members who were unemployed and having a hell of a time with the relief administration, so there was this feeling of a family between the two groups. Remember they were all ex-auto workers in Flint and they just felt as though we’ve got to help each other. The auto workers were backing us at every point, and some of them, even , when they got their paychecks from the factory, would come over and say, "how’s the leaflet fund" and "Here’s an extra fifty cents," or "here’s a dollar" which for them was a big sacrifice because they had accumulated debts to the point that things were being repossessed, articles of furniture, radios, cars, or whatever. They made big sacrifices. Some of the auto workers would come out to our Saturday night dances and encourage everybody, "Look at what we did in the shops, and if it picks up again you’ll be in with us." So there was a feeling of unity, just a general feeling that it would be very difficult to draw lines in the city between auto workers and WPA workers.
Sherna: In going through the material it doesn’t seem to me that in most cities it was combined. It seems to be unique to Flint.
Genora: Well, you see, in Detroit, the unemployed would almost be lost. But Flint was a one industry town and you were either in the process of either being or not being an auto worker. In Detroit there were little odd jobs they could get in different departments of the city or whatever, hospitals and things like that, or even going on relief. They lived so many miles away from the plant. It was entirely different in Detroit. The unemployed could get lost. And remember this was a General Motors town. Chrysler workers and General motors workers had two entirely different strike situations; they didn’t have there the same acquaintanceships, the same rapport.
Sherna: Was there a real fight within the UAW then, when you wanted to incorporate the unemployed with the WPA workers?
Genora: No, not at that point. I think they were annoyed, but I don’t think they thought it was that important. I don’t think they thought anything about what we did there. Not much attention was paid to the WPA and the unemployed. There wasn’t too much until they felt that we got too militant.
Sherna: Now you were elected recording secretary from the beginning, or were there first temporary officers, do you recall?
Genora: I was the recording secretary, I think, of the whole thing. Who else could write? (Laughter)
Sherna: Was Roy Lawrence from the beginning one of the officers, too, or was that in 1940 when they tried to get rid of both of you?
Genora: I think Roy Lawrence came in later.
Sherna: But Claude Workman met Kermit on the job.
Genora: Yes.
Sherna: And he seemed to be involved very early. It was at the first demonstration that he was already involved.
Genora: Yes. He was already part of the project workers. Roy was not actually in from the beginning. He came from a little suburb town called Mt. Morris, and there was a crew of Mt Morris workers. Many of them worked in Buick because that was closest to their end of town. Roy Lawrence worked at AC which was at their end of town also. This little town was pretty cohesive, they knew everybody in Flint, and it was just outside the city. Pat Murray was one of the original ones, an older man. Roy Lawrence may have been, but I don’t think he was an officer from the beginning. I think Pat Murray was.
Sherna: Genora, what was the relationship of the early group, who were involved in the local to the SWP. Was the entire organizing group already involved in the SWP, was there a connection between the local and the SWP?
Genora: No, While we were building the local we were building the SWP simultaneously. There was a lot of respect because of our strike activities. Claude Workman, Pat Murray and Roy Lawrence and all these people I have named with the exception of ED Weber and Joseph Duprey—I can’t think of any others, though, that we didn’t recruit as we were building the WPA local 12.
Sherna: So it was the other way around rather than them becoming...
Genora: But as I say, when I say recruit, we signed them up and they did read the Militant. They didn’t understand the whole business of why they were a Trotskyist or why did you have to use that name. They preferred to say, "We’re Socialists. We belong to the Socialist Workers Party." They had the real American approach. The rest of it was beyond them. If we said something was right, it was right. We didn’t have the opportunity to sit down and have any political discussions during this time.
Sherna: So the discussions were primarily about relief measures, about the cut in WPA workers, the day to day. As you were first forming in the spring of 1939, what was the relationship with the Workers Alliance? It becomes clear later on that they were in conflict with your group.
Genora: We tried on occasion to have united front demonstrations, because they did have the foreign born people and they did have an older established union—and were known in the beginning when we weren’t; we had to go out on the projects. When we went out to the projects, of course, many of them related to the UAW-CIO Local 12 label a whole lot better than did the Workers Alliance. We became bigger than they did. In the beginning when we wanted to have them join the demonstration— who were we anyway, and they ignored us completely. Then they sent people down into our meetings saying, Well, we have big dances." It’s true, they had big pot lucks, they had a lot of foreign born woman who could put on dishes. Some of our people from our union used to go up there for the dances. But came back for the business end of our meetings, too. In the beginning they didn’t think that we were a significant factor. Later when we became larger, then they were more interested in sending people in to raise questions. We could handle them easily, and sometimes we won them over. They wouldn’t meet with us because they felt that we were a rival organization and if we had a united front we might take more of their members away.
Sherna: So you didn’t deal in your literature, for instance, with talking about the Worker Alliance as compared to the WPA union.
Genora: No, we tried to keep away from getting into that factional thing. Because even in the UAW at this time the Homer Martin And R. J. Thomas fight was on and we were involved in all these things going on, and we were more interested in this big UAW international and what was happening inside of that, even at the same juncture. We’d get up in our speeches and say, “Look at what we have won for you, that the Workers Alliance wasn’t able to win,” and we would point to many things like this. We had professional people in from the Workers Alliance writing handbills and things like that, and that’s why we had to continue getting our leaflets out on the job every week.
Sherna: Were many of these people in the Workers Alliance people who you had difficulties with during the strike, who were members of the Communist Party or was this a different batch of people.
Genora: The people we’d had difficulties with, the CP faction, those people within the plants had seniority, or were working, would naturally give their support to the Workers Alliance. There was a tremendous amount of respect for what this WPA unemployed local was doing. It was a brand new thing which was born and it was getting headlines in the paper. The Workers Alliance was too because the Flint Journal was very afraid of the leadership of it. But we were pretty dramatic during the time, they didn’t think of any such thing as the Death Watch, you know. You can see how completely immersed in Flint, Michigan I was at that time, can’t you?
Sherna: Yes. Were you aware of WPA locals in other cities at this point when you were beginning the real organization there.?
Genora: Well, naturally you read about them in the papers.
Little smidgens. It is a strange thing this one conference in Pittsburgh had almost left my mind, until I got the leaflet, I had forgotten it. We didn’t have time for conferences; one or two in Detroit but they were usually with just one select person from each section—very small meetings.
Sherna: Under the aegis of the UAW?
Genora: Yes. They didn’t have any ideas to offer to us in Flint, and I think that’s why we just went right ahead with our own little housekeeping problems and our own organization right on the spot were we were.
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Sherna: Now, do you recall who made up the bulk of demonstrators?
Genora: I know they were men, primarily. The professional projects were few in number compared to the big work projects. Those women were well content; the school canning projects and the library projects made room for all these women.
Sherna: How about the sewing projects?
Genora: The sewing projects were all women. Even, I think, the overseers, the supervisors were women. Yes they were women. So in this professional projects it was a small minority and they felt pretty good. They were learning a lot of things on these jobs. They felt pretty good about having these jobs and feeding their families again. Practically everything that was done was done by the men on the outside projects, and any participation in demonstrations, usually they brought their wives along with them. This wasn’t too common even then. When we talk about dances, they were apt to bring their wife to a dance than they were to some kind of a demonstration. They felt men had won, had built the union by themselves and they could handle everything else, so we didn’t have very many women.
Sherna: Do you recall, Genora, at that first demonstration before the actual death watch was set up, was the crowd primarily WPA workers, at that point, or were the unemployed already directly involved?
Genora: They were mainly WPA workers at that point. We had to go to the unemployed and say, there is a place for you and you don’t have to pay dues. They were so involved in trying to hold their families together that to go to an organized protest was a big thing for them.
At the beginning its the WPA workers. If it happened to be an auto worker who perhaps worked three days a week—if it happened on a day when he was free, that auto worker would join, even from the beginning.
Sherna: What about the members who were in the Socialist Party, would they become involved?
Genora: Oh, sure.
Sherna: They were not part of the WPA.
Genora: Oh sure, but let me think now, Grover English was in Buick. He had a lot of seniority. I don’t remember his participation because he was working. Bruce Sloan was a sign painter; I think he left Flint shortly after that too. He wasn’t involved. Fred Stevens went back to bus driving; bus drivers were not hit by this. Carl Johnson was working because he had the highest seniority in the plant. So I don’t remember the SP’ers—they were in sympathy with us but I don’t remember them playing any role in it. They just weren’t involved. I don’t remember any of them on WPA. That tells you that the age level of those SP’ers was quite high too, if you had that much seniority(laughter).
Sherna: Now it seems that the death watch then was the very next thing that followed up shortly after that and as far as I can tell it began about May 1st. Can you describe the whole planning of that and how you reached the unemployed, particularly they were the ones involved with this, aren’t they?
Genora: Yes, these unemployed who had no more rent allowances were evicted by their landlords, and the police, the sheriff was there to help evict them. They would set their furniture out in the side walk, and the take the mother and children and put them in one big shelter. They called it a community center but we called it a shelter. They would feed them, the mother and children in one and the men were sent to a separate one, and we thought this was a horrible thing, dividing the family.
Their furniture and God knows what,—sometimes relatives could take it in their houses. This was primarily one of the things we felt horrendous. We didn’t quite know what to do about it.
We first organized crews to go and set the furniture back in the house. That became such a big operation. I remember those crews. There were fights and all kinds of black eyes and every thing that came of that. We decided to dramatize it so that everybody in the city of Flint would know. The daily papers were playing this down. We decided to do it in a huge park with big oak trees across from the Buick factory on Industrial Avenue and across the street from one of the Buick divisions. The windows of the Buick factory faced on this park and the park was a square city block. We decided to advertise and got some great big huge army tents.
Sherna: Where did you get them, do you recall?
Genora: There was somebody in the WPA union who knew somebody who had one. Where did I get the typewriter for these leaflets? Do you want me to tell you? One night my brother-in-law and another guy, who didn’t have money for dental work, and had front teeth missing—they thought I was some kind of a goddess if I put out leaflets without a typewriter. Previously I had to go to a union hall to use their typewriters to cut a stencil and then we had to run it off where ever we could. This was hard, I had two kids.
One night about 11 or 12 o’clock at night, they came up with a typewriter, an old Remington and four or five cartons of cigarettes. Nobody had money for a carton of cigarettes, a pack was something else again. Somewhere they got the typewriter and refused to tell me how or where. They advised me not to take it to a union hall. They did say don’t worry about it.
Sherna: Did the local have its own office or did you have to use the offices of another union local?
Genora: At that point, I think we had a little room. At the time of the death watch, I think we were able to rent a little room. No it was a large one, that’s right, because it had been torn down. It was a very old building. That, too, was on Industrial Avenue.
Sherna: I noticed that on one of the leaflets there’s one address on Industrial Avenue. A little bit later it says ,"note our new address" which was still on Industrial Avenue.
Genora: We did have one room 2317, yes, and 2621. Alright the new address, this would have been the big one if we were able to hold a dance in that one. This one was just a little room and it was so bare; bare wooden floors and bad walls. We made signs and put them in the second one. We got donated chairs, I think the local unions gave us some folding chairs. They also gave us a long table to hold our meetings with but outside of that we had nothing.
Sherna: So at the time of the death watch you were in this small little place.
Genora: I think we were, yes. Because I remember they said don’t take it anywhere around a union hall. I had it up in this third floor apartment of mine and I did the typing up there.
Sherna: The idea of the death watch was that the evicted families would come to the tent in the park?
Genora: I think there were only three families or four families to move into it. They were on display like fish in a bowl, to say, “I’m on relief” to the whole world and have the idle rich and everybody else come and stare at you like freaks or curiosity objects. It was not easy. The women particularly were sensitive. Two of them had young babies and along with everything else in a public park. We set up, I think two big army tents and one small camping tent. Then the rest of it was not too hard because people in Michigan go hunting to get food, go deer hunting. Most Michigan auto workers has a shotgun or a rifle. They had a certain amount of crude camping equipment. They had mats they put down on the floors and they had army cots that they use for camping when you go north hunting. I think we had a little Coleman burner and to keep warm we had to have some metal barrels and they built fires in those. They had holes cut underneath so that there could be a draft into the barrel. You could cook meals on them. Most of the cooking was done out side of the tent. It was too much of a hazard inside and you had the little ones in.
You had quilts and everything, and you had children clothes and everything else. The mothers would wash their babies diapers in tubs of water in drums of hot water and soap. We strung up lines between the trees and they’d hang up their children’s clothes and diapers for everyone to see. When it was warm enough they ate outside much of the time. If too many people came driving by, they shooed the children inside.
Sherna: Did People come to see them?
Genora: Oh, that’s the value of the whole thing. On both corners, the main corners by the plant and across from the Welfare building we had great big signs painted, “This a death watch” People are going to starve to death in the city of Flint, then the whole city may as well watch them die. Very dramatic, nevertheless it was true. We did have babies that were dying in Hurley Hospital because the county doctor Winchester provided us with information and he gave us actual statistics.
He said, “You don’t need to let them know where you got it but on such a case they are saying died of measles or mumps or whatever disease” the actual fact of the matter is none of these babies would have died if there hadn’t been just under nourishment and starvation.”
Sherna: Can you tell me a little bit about the four families, were they politically conscious?
Genora: No. One of the women came from a coal miner’s family and she felt that it was her duty to get out there with her husband. She was the one that had the nursing baby and three or four other little kids running around. The other family is hazy to me now. She was very timid, very shy. I’m thinking in terms of the women because the women bore the biggest brunt of this. The men were on demonstrations and everything else. I can’t tell you about them. I only remember that one woman hanging out her clothes and cooking. She didn’t look to the left or the right.
Sherna: Well how did these particular families become the ones that were in this.
Genora: Our union representatives went out to these eviction places and shelters and asked. They must have asked four dozen families before we got anybody to agree. Then we had to make provisions of getting the tents and the rest of it.
Sherna: Was there an attempt by the city to have them removed, that you were violating city code or anything when it was set up?
Genora: Oh yes, oh yes, of course. We were warned. They didn’t want to have too much of a fight over this business. We were warned and served some kind of notice at the union headquarters. We strung wires right up to the city electrical lines. Men shimmied up the poles and connected the wiring which was illegal as hell and dangerous. It may have been Consumers Power union men who did this for us, because we had a lot of help on this. Right directly into the tents was a string of lights hanging down with an electric light bulb from a clothes line or whatever they had it hooked on in front of the tent. At night you could see these bulbs shining inside the tents and then outside. We didn’t want anybody sneaking up and setting fire to them, so we had lights outside the tents, too. It seems like we had a light bulb on one of these signs so that it could be seen at night, too, all night long.
Of course we were served with notices. The ranting and raving went on the radio and in the press but they didn’t take any overt action. I think they felt that this was the whole feeling of the town; these people had gone through the Depression These people ,even if working in the shops, had been on WPA or on relief. Their sympathies were with us. This was a very sensitive issue. They knew families whose babies were crying for milk and who were hungry for a long period of time in the city.
Sherna: But it was definitely seen as an action by the union.
Genora: Oh yes. We had “WPA Local 12, UAW-CIO” on that sign. Also right on the bottom. We issued statements and leaflets about that on all the projects. Asking people who had the time after work to see that there was no attack on the families.
Sherna: So there was a picket surrounding the park, in other words?
Genora: It wasn’t exactly a picket; there were always these groups, primarily by the sign. A group of men at this corner here and another in the yard talking and walking through the park. It was all open with the trees. It wasn’t exactly a picket line. We did have a picket line when we first started it and after we got our sign up we had a demonstration. We didn’t want it to peter out so we called it a demonstration for the day.
Sherna: But, there was in effect a patrol, though.
Genora: Well, we sort of called them guards.
Sherna: And there were twenty four hour watches?
Genora: Yes. People would come down there and stay two or three hours. Other people would be leaving and coming and it was something that just took on a life of its own. No one had to organize their schedules. “Guess I’ll just go down and see how they are coming along. I’ll be there for a couple of hours.” If they saw there were not enough people they’d stay a couple of hours longer. If there were too many people, well maybe they’d drive on and they’d come back the next day or evening. It was the single men who came down in the evening.
Sherna: Would people from the city come and drive to see this was it view as a...
Genora: Yes.
Sherna: What was their reaction, was it mockery, or were they moved by it at all?
Genora: Well, remember the majority of the city was workers. Sympathy was the biggest reaction, but there were also other people with big cars and it was the big juicy gossip item outside the city. They would come, “Is this really true?”—the reactionaries and anti-union people couldn’t believe it. What is happening. They have taken over the public power lines. Is this revolution?
It was a remarkably dramatic thing because it shook up the whole city. Even those unemployed thought this is the way we were to act. They didn’t want to get out there by themselves but they saw the effectiveness of it. There was no attempt to move a whole lot of people there because we had difficulties finding the facilities.
Sherna: Where did the food and things come initially?
Genora: I don’t know. I know people used to bring hot dishes because they knew it was very difficult to cook down there. They brought food and donations. Again, there was no organization required on that, either. It just seemed as though this was what the WPA and the auto workers had been through with the union and those who had a couple of quarters were going to see that these people were taken care of. We always had the workers in the plant across Industrial Avenue in Buick. When they were working and walking past the windows, they’d check every tow or three minutes; there would be people checking to see if there were any police coming out. If there was any police cars pulling up at all why they had an agreement that they were coming out with their wrenches and whatever tools they had.
Sherna: Did the people in the welfare office across the street react at all?
Genora: No. There was no visible sign. They didn’t see it at all. As far as a reaction , they didn’t say anything. I’m sure they wired Lansing and Washington. The news was going all over the country. They weren’t going to let us know anything of their reactions.
Sherna: This apparently when the surplus food was sent in in response to the death watch.
Genora: It must have been. I can’t remember whether it was sent in at the time of the sit down strike and the effigy of the city manager or wether it was sent in as a result of the death watch. You know, we had a number of other project demonstrations and shut downs, demands and all kinds of things going on all the time. So, I don’t know exactly when that was that they opened up the commodities which they said was absolutely non-existent. Washington had said they couldn’t send anymore; they wired Lansing and we were told again and again that there were no further surplus commodities. You know what the surplus commodities were then, don’t you? Boiled beef in cans and that ground up coarse wheat that had a bitter taste to it; I think it must have been moldy. There were some good things, like dried fruit. You could exist on it. Women used strange recipes and used all kind of ways of whipping up that stuff into more palatable concoctions.
Sherna: Were there attempts to negotiate meetings with the welfare people?
Genora: Oh, our officers were always trying to meet with them but we got shut off by sighs, “Well, we can’t our hands are tied.”
Sherna: Apparently, it started as a specific response to these nine hundred families that had been cut off of relief.
Genora: Yes. When they were cut off and even before then when some of them were evicted.
Sherna: Do you remember anything about the Charles Adams family where he was evicted and they moved all the furniture into the park where the death watch was going on, do you recall that?
Genora: Maybe. What was the name of the family where the woman was the wife of the miner?
Sherna: Well they describe a family. It sounded like the death watch was already going on and the truck drivers union—it wasn’t the teamsters— it was sort of a drivers union— volunteered, went and took the the furniture which the city was going to store, and out the family in centers, and they delivered the furniture right where the death watch was and they moved into a tent down there.
Genora: Well, I vaguely remember. When I said I thought some of the furniture from the eviction was brought down there, that was the truck. When you report one incident like this—the truckers would help us out, the electrical workers and many other workers would help us.
Sherna: Was the attitude of the AFL supportive of this?
Genora: No.
Sherna: They were the usual...
Genora: Craftsmen. They had no use even for the mass production workers being organized. They thought they were an uncouth, uncultured, untrained people. No... In every group there might have been a few, I can remember two at Chevrolet in tool and die that were great. There probably were some among the craft workers, too, but when it came to the plumbers and the carpenters you’d have just individuals, not the locals.
Sherna: And the fact that it was a CIO affiliate, they probably couldn’t have joined it in any event.
Genora: No. And their workers were employed most of the time.
Sherna: The death watch was still in operation two weeks later and apparently you were trying to plan some sort of demonstration.,do you recall? And that’s when there were some problems with the UAW and CIO leaders not cooperating, although they initially didn’t come right out and say they were opposed to it. Do you recall anything about that demonstration?
Genora: I remember that ... there were so many proposals at the time; there were people who actually wanted to take over city hall. They wanted to go down and occupy all of the offices, and then say to the state government, “What are you going to do? You can’t operate here in this city where the majority of the people, are without (jobs).” We couldn’t see how we could maintain that kind of thing, and we didn’t want any defeats. So, I don’t know there were all kinds of demonstrations in various parts of town, too.
Sherna: Were there membership meeting of the local in which the actions were decided upon for the demonstrations or was it primarily by the officers?
Genora: Of the local Union?
Sherna: Yes, Local 12.
Genora: Oh, there were membership meetings. The executive board was empowered to take emergency actions in the interim. You must remember that these leaflets were going out regularly that even if a person couldn’t come down to a meeting—I’m sorry I haven’t really got the good leaflets—they were kept informed. They were informed by the stewards on the job every morning with a fresh report, but then it was all outlined in written form at least once a week, in leaflet form. The discussions on WPA were mainly from men work projects, many of them were about these tactics, and all about what we were doing, or should be done on the projects themselves really. The stewards were contacted by somebody from the union going around every day so that the information was fresh.
Sherna: Who would be the ones who communicated with the unemployed?
Genora: The unemployed very often would come up to the union headquarters. There would be people from the union contacting them all day long. They didn’t like it but there wasn’t much they or we could do about it.
The whole town was in pretty bad shape. If the police launched an attack against the unemployed, the WPA workers would have come in right off the job with their shovels and picks. If they launched an attack against the Death Watch, you had the factory workers across the street. But the unemployed were contacted mainly when they came up to the relief headquarters.
That’s the way we learned about evictions very often, or the WPA workers on the job would say, “My neighbors next door are coming out today. What do you say we take off at lunch hour and go out there and move the furniture back in.” It was a period of great homogeneity in the city because we were all just either coming out of a bad depression and just going back to work, or had gone through the whole strike experience. Now, the whole Buick division of Flint was the best off of anybody in the city of Flint. They worked right straight through, but even they had people laid off. They had relatives that were in other plants on WPA or on relief.
Sherna: Basically it seemed like there was tremendous solidarity without ideology, and that this solidarity was very concrete day-to-day living situation.
Genora: Yes. And the one lesson that they learned from the strike was that if you stick together you can win; if you don’t, why you starve to death. That’s the one thing uppermost in their minds.
On the WPA projects there was a foreman that tried to threaten workers all the time by saying that if you do this or if you do what the union is instructing you to do, we can lay you off, and of course they were firing WPA workers and we had grievances. Our grievance committee would go right out—Claude Workman was especially good at that— go right out on the project if the worker was fired—take that worker right up to the foreman and fight it through.
Sherna: Did The WPA administration formally recognize the grievance procedure?
Genora: Yes. I don’t know wether they formally or informally did, but it worked because they had a volatile situation. A whole project would sit down until a man got back to work. Other projects near by would hear about it, and they would send words of solidarity over. I think it was mainly that they didn’t want any more disturbance.
They had gone through a big strike, having a lot of trouble within the UAW with the company’s main interest in support of the Martin faction within the union.
Sherna: I can’t quite figure out when the Death Watch ended or what brought it to an end. Do you recall? It went on for at least two weeks and then there is no mention of it ending or a resolution. It suddenly disappeared from any reports.
Genora: I believe there was an end to the evictions. I think that there was some agreement that they would have a moratorium on further evictions and the separation of families. We ended the shelters at that time. They came out with another excuse in the papers, they usually do,—the appropriations weren’t enough for the shelters or God knows what—some kind of a coverup. When that happened ,I think we found houses for those people and helped them move back in. There was always so much activity going on, even when they found another house or found a place for them, they very often had to go around to other relatives and pick up their bed, their tables, their iceboxes. There was no such thing as calling up to deliver this or that. There was so many actions going on. Just poor helping poor but the shelter system was discontinued, and I’m pretty sure then we pulled down the Death Watch signs and announced a big victory. It was needed for the morale of the people, and it was a victory.
Sherna: Now apparently, even at this point in May of 1939 you were beginning to be under attack. It seems and then that wasn’t mentioned again until the following year. The next thing I came across seemed to be a resolution by the WPA division about inadequate relief and sending a resolution to the tax allocation board. There seemed to be continuing resolutions passed that would then go to official agencies on an ongoing basis.
The next big thing was the national WPA strike which began in July; they were going to cut back all their help beginning July 1. The one in Flint was July 11, do you recall anything about that? In Flint it was just a one day strike.
Genora: I only recall that everybody just left their jobs and walked off and there again, I don’t think anything was said to anybody as to who went back the next day. I don’t think any issue was made. I think they wanted to keep the thing as quiet as they could the whole period. We had to fight like the devil for any kind of publicity.
Sherna: Now at this point, Kermit was still on the project digging ditches, because I noticed that the figure was 3,600 of the four thousand ditch diggers walked out during the strike.
Genora: Oh, yes, he was definitely on it because I remember there were a couple of projects where they had been threatened by the foreman and Kermit took crews around and shut those down. Kermit, Claude Workman, Roy Lawrence, Pat Murray and Ed Beckwith—there was two or three—maybe more went from project to project. The foremen were particularly strong at one project and they told the workers that anyone that walked off the job would not need to come back the next day. Kermit’s group marched in on the job and pulled the shovels out of their hands and led them off the job. Yes, he was still there, I remember.
Sherna: Genora, it seems there was inactivity; there was a drive to enroll all WPA workers at this point. The workers were attacked by the Workers Alliance because at this point of the strike, there was apparently a big demonstration at the post office of over 500 people and Charles Lewis from the Fisher Body Local, Claude Workman, and Kermit were defined as the leaders. That’s when they asked this guy, Wayne Adams, from the Workers Alliance to say something. What was your relationship with the Workers Alliance people at that point?
Genora: I know they were very reluctant to have anything to do with us, but I do remember that he hid appear. I don’t believe the rest of the officers of the Workers Alliance came along. Adams was a half way decent guy, I liked him, and he did appear, and made a very short speech. That’s all I remember. I guess the papers said afterwards he came out and...
Sherna: He basically extolled the FBI.
Genora: Yes, and praised Franklin Delano Roosevelt, yes.
By the way, we attacked Roosevelt a couple of times during the course of that WPA development. We were very careful about the way we did it because he was revered by many workers. But we did it as a challenge and because we were respected, because there were so many people fighting together, they didn’t think too much about us attacking FDR.
We attacked Roosevelt and his war budget, and compared it to the cutbacks in relief. This of course was a big point of difference because the Workers Alliance was all pro-Roosevelt.
Sherna: Then it seemed that there was a period of quiescence of the union. This is a period where there was some of the fight going on against you and Roy Lawrence. It seems this period of quiescence began after the strike in July. It talks about holding meetings and resolutions were independently recorded on an anti-war position, resolutions, antiwar resolutions, and then this whole thing about the referendum for voting on war. Do you recall anything during that period?
Genora: I don’t think there were so many strikes and demonstrations. I think things had kind of leveled off where we were just carrying on the usual activities. Projects would have a strike if the foreman got too tough or something. The dances were going on; I don’t think we had any big demonstrations during that period. But I can’t be sure. The leaflets were continuing to go out, all during the period with instructions and information. We were concerned about war appropriations and the relation to the business of feeding people. We were beginning to talk about permanent jobs, too. Permanent jobs instead of war appropriations.
Sherna: That’s beginning to come up, I think at that conference, too. The conference of unemployed and project workers occurred in Pittsburgh. It wasn’t the same kind of relationship as you had in Flint. There area couple of women’s names. It seems that you and someone named Maria Nictra, sister Hearst from Pittsburgh, Myrtle McKean are the only women’s names I came across; you were on the resolutions committee.
Genora: Well that was a very short conference of two or three days. We just met and so I don’t recall them or their activities. It would seem that the women would probably stand out but they don’t.
Sherna: So you don’t recall any follow-up at all from this conference?
Genora: No, none. I don’t remember ever having any communications— and I was the recording secretary.
Sherna: It probably came at a time when there was already beginning to have increased employment.
Genora: Yes, and we were beginning to bleed from the WPA unions. We were glad of that. We were asking for jobs and we weren’t happy that most of the plants were retooling and going into production for the armed forces. We weren’t happy about that and I think that’s why we kept hammering away that we wanted it to go to jobs that were going to mean something.
Sherna: There seems to be a new campaign in 1940 beginning in February, that was a militant action. You passed some resolutions about war funds for the unemployed—that’s when there was a demonstration in front of the Welfare Building forcing recognition of the unions demands. I think there was a take-over of the building, a sit-in. Can you describe that?
Genora: Well, that was a pretty good sized one and they had several patrol cars of police going along the street because of the numbers of people and the numbers of banners that we had, and the effigy on great big poles. I don’t know who made the effigy but it was a pretty drastic looking guy hung by the neck, you know, with the name of the administrator, Van Geison, I think was his name. We were meeting with the administrator in his office when this demonstration—we knew it was planned and scheduled—and he was no-no no-ing us, and he looked out and saw the demonstration and saw the effigy of himself. He turned slightly pale and excused himself and he didn’t come back to the negotiations. So that’s when we sent one of the persons down and said, “Okay, instead of just marching around the building, walk right in and we’ll sit down until we get an answer.”
When we did that the police also got out of their cars. We knew that the plant across, the Buick Plant workers were surprised to see so many police cars; they would have seen the whole thing. They would be watching us. So we were apprehensive. We thought, Oh boy, here comes another pitched battle but in this case I’m telling you the police came up and started talking to us as friends and telling us about some intolerable situations that they had been immediately connected with. We took up a collection to go out and buy some bologna and some sliced brad and mustard, to have something because we were there so long and began to get hungry. We didn’t know how long we were going to be there.
This is the first time in my memory that the police contributed to that collection. We got the bread, mustard and bologna and made sandwiches. I don’t remember if we had something to drink other than water. We stayed the night and in the morning word came that Lansing was waiting for word from Washington. In a few hours, that late afternoon we got word and then Van Geisen came in.
"Well it is all settled. Surplus commodities will be opened up again in Flint and you can assure your people that as soon as they reach here, a delivery will be made." Again we claimed another victory; more leaflets out to the projects and more celebrations.
It’s very difficult to operate with unemployed people. There morale is so low. They feel they are the rejects of the human race and that’s why it’s so important to claim victories and to talk about brotherhood. We had pretty unique conditions in Flint. They were not able to do that in a many other places. In the one-industry town, you have the possibilities of dramatizing it and of bringing a little bit of pride to the unemployed. We really did. We would give speeches to them and say, “Why shouldn’t we be proud that we are banded together. All of your life you have supported this government, you paid for this government, you paid for the streets, you’ve paid for the buses. Why should you feel that you’re not as worthy as others.” On top of this you can say all these things to them why they shouldn’t feel bad but if you’re tired, hungry, and battling people who won’t even consider you as human beings, it is very hard keeping their spirits up, much harder than any other kind of organizing I’ve been in.
Sherna: Now this was done both over the relief issue and also to force recognition of the union. Isn’t this when relief administrator Van Geisen agreed to weekly meetings?
Genora: He almost had to recognize our union. But, no if he felt with us he would, and if he didn’t, and when he got to a bind when he thought there would be trouble, he just avoided us. He was a man who could lock himself in a closet. That’s the first time we had an agreement that there would be regular meetings on regular days.
Sherna: Do you recall if that in fact happen?
Genora: Yes, but I don’t recall too many of them because as I say, this is at the end of the WPA unions. Oh, yes, we had a set time like every Monday morning at ten o’clock and the whole committee would be there and we would have every thing typed—because I got the job of typing very often—what the demands would be for the week. He actually got so he would talk to us about the problems on the job; why he couldn’t do this and what he would try to do, and of course the government red tape. The very fact that the poor could come up in the building and know that on Monday morning there was a representative who’s going to take it up in the committee and the committee was going to take this problem up, was really great.
Sherna: There was this victory with Van Geisen then which seemed to be like a new surge of activity in March of that year.
Genora: Oh, by the way, this isn’t important but there was quite a lot of anti-German sentiment that came in with the name Van Geisen. We had to be always trying to explain to people, not to take advantage of it because we had Nazism in Germany by this time, the Nazi dictatorship.
Sherna: Apparently then is when there seems to be this fight against you and Roy Lawrence.
Genora: Well, that is very vague. The one thing that stands out in my mind in that regard is... Well, first of all we knew generally that Joe Pagano, an inexperienced Italian in Detroit, inexperienced with these kind of organizations and activities; he wasn’t an organizer, didn’t quite comprehend what he was supposed to be doing in that role, and was ever concerned that this thing was getting out of hand. We were far too militant, getting far too much publicity for the UAW which at that time was having its own problems with factional differences. So he was not happy with us at all. Of course, we couldn’t care less how he felt about it. But there was one particular leaflet that I put out. I copied a huge big cartoon that came out of one of the CIO papers—I am not sure if it was the UAW paper—or one of the other CIO unions. This cartoon was a bitter thing. It had a big giant representing war appropriations and the little public worker pleading, or whatever the connotation was; it was very sharp, sharp picture that would immediately call to mind men digging a ditch,—look where all our money is going , instead of decent jobs, and housing. So I copied this picture by just drawing it and duplicating it on the mimeograph machine and we had our own incendiary. I think he notified the president—he was president and secretary treasury. He notified a couple of people in our local union because Claude Workman at that point was the president. Maybe we elected Claude on the basis of that, I’m not sure of that. We had a couple of people in there who were conservatives and who were a little bit concerned about what would happen if we got too militant and charges were preferred against us, to remove us from office. Pagano said he had the authority from the International union to remove us. The only thing that I know is that soon after, we threw his people out. We made a trip to Detroit to explain to him but he was such an arrogant son of a gun...
Sherna: You and Workman?
Genora: No, our top executive officer committee. I think there was a carload of five of us. We went down to explain to him—he was a very arrogant man—we didn’t get anywhere with him. He didn’t make his own decisions. I don’t know where his decisions were coming from but we gathered then that there was no further purpose in our talking to him. We invited him to a meeting in Flint. By this time we moved to a larger hall. This meeting was so large we had to have planks put on boxes to seat all the people. Men were standing up in the back of the room. Joe Pagano came up and believe me, not only were we reinstated with his consent but he was faced with the picture of the original CIO paper from whence we took the cartoon which ostensibly was the basis for the charges against us.
Joe Pagano was tickled to death to recant, apologize, and almost plead for a safe passage out of that hall. It was a packed meeting, a very dramatic meeting and of course we didn’t have to say one word in defense because the workers from the projects came in and jam-packed the place. They told Joe Pagano where he could go and they didn’t want him back in Flint, again. Shortly after that we had elections and threw out of office the Pagano officers and Claude Workman, I believe was then elected president; Pat Murray and the rest of the crew.
Sherna: There are these letters in May about Duprey not releasing the funds. Was that part of this, that they were holding back the funds because of this fight?
Genora: It’s possible. I don’t remember. Several of us suspected Duprey of being an agent of, perhaps, of the corporation we never got into any hysteria over it but we did not trust this man. He didn’t have any one supporting his position.
Sherna: Was Lawrence in the SWP at this point, also?
Genora: Probably. Yes, I am sure.
Sherna: What was the role of the CP in all of this fight. Were they instigators in it or supporting Pagano?
Genora: No, they were in the Workers Alliance. The Workers Alliance had nothing to do with the UAW Unemployed union and Pagano had nothing to do with the Workers Alliance. If there was any talk on the jobs, they probably would be against the whole idea of Local 12. They would prefer to have them in their own unemployed union , the Workers Alliance.
Sherna: During this period they pulled your union charter as well.
Genora: Yes, but it was reinstated after the Pagano meeting. They sent notice they were pulling the charter of the local—they didn’t want responsibility or something like that. Because of the period and the factories calling the men back to work, it was no longer a great big issue. We had elected officers, continued with our work and I then went over on the professional project in this period or shortly thereafter.
Sherna: Now, when was it that you started work on WPA?
Genora: I don’t know. I can’t tell you that and I can’t tell you how long I was there. I was trying to figure it out the other day. The first project I was put on was in the time-keeping department of the library project, that and another couple of recreation projects were located in the water plant of the city of Flint.
I was working on that and one day one of our Flint newspapers, Flint News Advertiser, not as large as the Flint Journal, had a big headline. “Flint’s leading red in position to blow-up the water supply of the city.” My gosh, I’ll tell you, the whole city was aghast! The moment I saw it—well, I was named in it, I thought, “Oh no, not again.”
There was such a big to-do about it. The first thing they demanded I be fired immediately, if not sooner. I could poison everybody or blow it up; poison was the main threat. Nobody would know if I put poison in the water supply of the whole city.
The woman who hired me, the head of the whole professional services division, was a very interesting woman, born in India, raised in England. She was of English parentage, and she was a socialist. In this country she was a foreigner, married to a Swiss. When I was in the sixth grade her little son was my boyfriend and she knew me in this way. She knew where I came from, my whole family background. She was a secret admirer of mine. I didn’t really know it at the time until she called me into her office over this water project thing. She said,"Can’t they get ridiculous?”
“Well, I suppose, Mrs. Meyers, that you’re going to have to release me. You were the one directly responsible for hiring me.” She replied, “No, I think we can find another way, we don’t need to fall into this trap of hysteria.” She transferred the whole WPA project out of the Water Department premises and the city lost some revenue from the Federal Government as a result. When the new district administration building was completed, why, I was transferred up there.
Sherna: Now, Genora, you were actually working as a WPA worker at this point, in the activities of Local 12. Was there any problem, was there any pressure on you because of your involvement in the local?
Genora: No. Because at this time the pressures were all from the projects. Things seemed to be winding up for the men. The men were being called back into the shops. The men were doing the demonstrating. The professional projects were mainly women; there were men in them, recreation naturally, but the biggest bulk of them were women. They were not active in the union, they were separate and apart; it was a minority of the WPA operation nationally, too. This is when they began actually instituting training programs to train people for war production plants.
Sherna: During this time of the fight where they pulled the charter, you were already in the bookkeeping...
Genora: I think I went on WPA after the big fight. I think that after it was over we elected our own officers. I went on, when it became a business-as-usual operation. Now you must remember that I was also participating in what was happening in the UAW; the inner union factional fight between Homer Martin and the Unity group. We were having all kinds of discussions going on in that regard too, and that was a big interest of mine, also.
Sherna: At the same time you seemed to becoming a spokesperson for the SWP.
Genora: Yes, because the war issue was for me very, very important, for the whole movement, the whole Socialist movement and that became a much bigger interest to me than any project operation.
Here on the WPA project there was a collection being taken up from everybody in supervisory capacity in the district office for the campaign fund of Franlin Delano Roosevelt. I refused to contribute and the demand went up from every one on that project that I be dismissed. It was FDR who put this program into effect, and if I didn’t want to contribute to his reelection, I should be dismissed. Again, Mrs Myers with her socialist background just held firm on that and I wasn’t dismissed.
I was opening up on FDR because of the orientation towards a military buildup. It looked like we might be entering the war.
Sherna: It seemed that’s when there was more and more focus on introducing resolutions within the WPA local on the war.
Genora: Yes, that’s right.
Sherna: It came from you?
Genora: That’s right. We went into all the UAW locals because we still maintained our contacts with them.
Sherna: Now at some point, when you went into the WPA work, that was to relieve Kermit to organize what?
Genora: To organize on the project sites where we—the men were working—where a woman would not be effective. I couldn’t have done the same job out there because these were rough, tough areas where you had to wear heavy boots and men had picks and shovels. He would have been more effective but it also was because personally we were in very dire situation. We were way behind, and creditors were bugging us and it was becoming very difficult. I could earn more money naturally than he could as an ordinary worker. It wasn’t easy for him to accept. At first it seemed like a good idea because this was his natural forte, speaking and organizing. He loved it.
Sherna: But when he did go off of it then it was officially to be an organizer for the local?
Genora: Unpaid, because we didn’t have any funds. He was very effective.
Sherna: And in that way he could go from site to site, whereas when he was on the project he was basically stuck.
Genora: Right, or he would have to take time off from work or leave early it it was very important. This way he was one of the people who could go from site to site.
Sherna: Now through this period, then, you were both actively involved in building the SWP chapter within Flint.
Genora: Yes, we were. We weren’t doing the kind of fundamental education work, but we were recruiting with workers. We would say, well, the final basic answer to our problems has got to be a change in the whole system. We would get into discussions with them and tell them why we belonged. If you were a dedicated person many times people came up and asked, “what motivates you? What turns you on? Why do you sacrifice like this?” So you have to tell them a little bit about your philosophy. They would say, “Gee, we’d like to be like you.” or “We’d like to be with you.” So this is the way we were building.
Sherna: What kind of reaction was there to the anti-war statements? Because most of the men were going back to the factories as a result of the war build-up.
Genora: I think that it really was the feeling of all the people in the area, and perhaps nationally, that they were building up to supply other nations, building arms or building an arsenal, But I think it was really the deepest feeling that they did not want to get involved in another war because we heard references to World War I and what came out of it and what didn’t come out of it. I really believe that it was the deep sentiment of an ordinary working man that yes, he wanted a job even if it was war production, he was hoping that it would be for the aid of our allies or as a stockpile. That’s why we could talk and be accepted at the same time the plants were retooling for war production.
Sherna: Because there seems to be a fair amount of organizing around the introduction of anti-war resolutions into first Local 12 and having it go through the CIO council.
Genora: That’s right. The state director of the CIO Council was Gus Scholle, who was a member of the SP and a very fine person. He married Kathleen Jones who was the daughter of an old SP member. They were pacifists and anti-war people and he had a strong influence on the council—I think Norm Bully was the Flint Council chairman—he had a strong influence on them locally. If you remember FDR, himself, was saying, “I’ll never send your sons to die across the ocean.” The whole nation was hoping that we would never get involved although they liked their jobs. They wanted to express themselves; we are anti-war as far as our involvement.
Sherna: So as the WPA union activity dies down, the main issue became the war and then the reactions and fights against people like Father Coughlin—he was in Detroit, wasn’t he?
Genora: Royal Oak, right outside of Detroit. He had a great listening audience in Flint, a great listening audience. He was truly fascist in his makeup because he sounded like a militant and on the side of the poor, on the side of the unwanted, and yet he would put across in the most insidious manner, the most reactionary propaganda.
Sherna: So, Genora, by this time you were being viewed as being an active organizer and leader within the SWP itself, because there’s that meeting in June 1939 that you attended, and then going to the CIO drive in Goshen, Indiana although I guess that wasn’t under the SWP, that was under the CIO. So it seems like you were being pushed by the party as a leader within the SWP.
Genora: Goshen, Indiana, yes a CIO representative of the SWP and he initiated that. Yes that’s true. I was being pushed into the forefront more and more. I guess it had value for them and I was so terribly interested in trying to do what I could to make the American workers anti-war.
Sherna: But it was pretty clear that you were the one being pushed and not Kermit, isn’t it, at that point?
Genora: Oh, yes.
Sherna: By this point he was beginning to sort of decline in terms of his drinking.
Genora: Yes, he was having a few problems.
Sherna: And so you remained in the WPA and then you went to Detroit to look for work.
Genora: Yes. When the WPA just petered out and the factories called back and the unemployed was no longer a problem there—-We were going pretty fast towards full employment— then Kermit looked for a job. Don’t remember now the circumstances. He wasn’t taken back into Plant four after all of this: when he did get back into Chevrolet, they took him into another plant because of his effectiveness as a speaker. I think he went to Detroit to look for work and he was down there—came home weekends—and he was down there for six months. He fell in love with somebody else, and he was living with somebody else. I didn’t know that for six months, but that’s the way the thing resolved itself.
Sherna: That’s when you started talking about separation.
Genora: Yes, When I found out about it ,I was quite shocked, because I was working and supporting the kids and we were going without a lot of things, like mittens and gloves and things like that in cold weather, to give him money to travel back and forth. Of course we had comrades and friends in Detroit and this where he said he was staying. He was getting a little bit more nervous on the weekends and didn’t want to be bothered by the kids.
One day I became very suspicious and I asked his dad if he could drive down to Detroit and see what was going on, and he said, “Well, you know, he’s living over there with Winnie. I said, “I don’t have a number.” Before he knew who was calling, Kermit’s father and I, went over there. We saw on his door—Mr. and Mrs. Kermit Johnson. I wanted to come home, turned around and came home.
When he came home that weekend and started to tell me the usual little tales, I said, “Why have you been lying to me all this time. Why don’t you tell me the truth?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Dad and I were down to Detroit on Grand Avenue, at your place.” That’s when he decided immediately that he had made a big mistake. I think we had a reconciliation and that fell apart and finally I said, “The only way you’re going to make up your mind is if I go a long ways away. I’m going to take a leave of absence from my job; I’ll go to New York with my sister and give you time to think about it.” He swore, you know what men usually say. Then I went to New York with my sister.
Sherna: The trip that you met Sol.
Genora: Yes, and then I met Sol.
Sherna: Now when you took a leave this was from the WPA job still?
Genora: Yes, this was from a project at Hurley Hospital.
Sherna: Audio Visual Project at Hurley.
Genora: Yes.
Sherna: Then after you met Sol—I just want to get us up to the point where you moved to Detroit so that we can start there the next time. Then you met Sol at a party.?
Genora: Yes, there was a big social gathering of the SWP and my sister and I went. He had just come in from a trip to Africa—he was in the merchant marines—and he met me that night. The next day he wanted to show us around because I had forgotten the layout of New York. I was asking if anyone was available to go around with us. He took us to see Orson Welles, what is the one about Hearst?
Sherna: Oh, Citizen Kane.
Genora: Citizen Kane. He took us to other places around the city for quite some time. A seaman gets paid off in a lump sum, and he was just in his glory that he had me around and could show me all over. All this time he thought that I was married and my sister was single. He was not interested in my sister. When she left she told him that I had gotten a letter and that it was all over between me and my husband and that I was very depressed about the whole thing because of the kids.
He made arrangements for me to go into a home of a family—friends that he knew, and to stay longer until I sort of got myself together. Every day he came over and he didn’t tell anybody else in New York what he knew because he said he did’t want any competition. Then after a week or ten days or something he asked me to marry him. I was surprised that my sister told him because he didn’t tell me before. Of course, I had no conception of marrying anybody at all at that stage, especially somebody who had never been married and was that much younger than I. You know what a woman will do in a case like that to discourage a man?
I told him I had very bad teeth—which was true. I had only one lung from tuberculosis, and that I was much older than he.
Sherna: What was the age difference?
Genora: Seven and a half years and that he was only ten years older than my oldest son and I didn’t need to take someone out of the cradle to come and live with me. I had two sons already and I didn’t need anybody else to take care of. I painted myself as a person who made my own decisions And I didn’t need anybody else, I was trying very hard to discourage him. I wasn’t successful in any of it.
Sherna: Then you went back to Flint. Afterwards you went a convention in Chicago.
Genora: Five of us drove from Chicago to Flint. There was an automobile accident near Pontiac on the way to New York. Sol never made it back to New York.
Sherna: He just stayed in Flint, then.
Genora: But he had to ship out; either be drafted or to ship out in the Merchant Marines. At this time he had to ship out, and he nearly lost his life when his ship was sunk in the Arctic Ocean, His ship was part of a convoy of 39 and about 30 were sunk. He was in a life raft. His feet were frozen and they landed on an island north of Russia, Novaya Zemla. An army plane brought him down to a hospital in Russia and the reports came out that there were no survivors from the S.S. Olopana. I thought he was dead for quite some time. I was feeling punk about that. This is when I went over into—the Hurley Hospital project— I asked to be transferred over into a training project to learn how to run milling machines and grinders, use of calipers, micrometers and things like that, be trained to read blue prints.
Sherna: The idea behind your wanting to get the training was to go into industry, the war industries.
Genora: Yes, I had to make a living and you couldn’t do it on WPA which was beginning to phase out.
Sherna: But it was to go into factory work, so that you could do organizing still within the factory rather than...
Genora: Naturally of course. We weren’t getting anywhere in organizing office workers. It was, of course, to be back in the union movement. It was something I knew very well and I could be of great assistance.
Sherna: And then Sol came back in 1942 and then you moved to Detroit right after he came back.
Genora: I had just completed my training course by that time and we moved to Detroit.
Sherna: Okay, That begins the war time experience.
Genora: That begins the war time experience.
Sherna: Up to this point Sol was involved in the SWP. Kermit was involved with the SWP, you were involved with the SWP until that later period when you moved to Detroit. After the war were you all relating to each other for that brief period before he shipped out? In your political work was there a brief period.
Genora: Kermit did move to Detroit with Winnie then.
Sherna: So that the organizing where Kermit and Sol worked together was later, after he moved back?
Genora: Yes, later when we went back to Flint the second time. Yes.
Sherna: How long was the program, and was it specifically to learn how to use instrumentation?
Genora: All the machinery. Lathe work, of course, naturally took the longest, milling machines and grinding. Yes, that’s all it was.
Sherna: And were the other people being trained women, predominantly, or was it mixed?
Genora: Mixed. You see, shop workers, production workers in the auto factory could be hired in right off the street and all they needed was a little brawn. But a lathe operator or a milling machine or some thing like that was a little step up; may not be skilled labor but very often it was. I think practically all the people in my class were men with the exception of about four or five women. I scored very high in the class, I was highly motivated, especially on blueprint reading, calipers, and miking things out; things like that I got very high on test scores. It was intensive training for war production, they had some damn good instructors and they put us through our paces. It was no Micky Mouse course.
Sherna: And the training was being done by WPA. Of course, this would have been before the intense mobilization of women into industry that happened a couple of months later, I think in 1942. And they were usually trained within their factories.
Genora: Right.
Sherna: When we ended the last time was were we got all through the WPA period and through the separation from Kermit and meeting Sol. We talked briefly about the training program.
Genora: You mean the machine shop.
Sherna: The machine shop. What I would like with is a little bit more detail about the training program and when the decision to move to Detroit occurred, and then getting the job in Detroit and becoming involved in the union there. Now the training program was still under the WPA, wasn’t it?
Genora: Yes, it was. That was part of training people for the factory and I gave up the supervisor job at the hospital.
At that time they thought I was crazy because they didn’t know how soon the WPA would be ending but I was sure it was ending.
We were trained on lathes, grinders, milling machines and how to read calipers—the rest of the things that would be necessary so that when we went into a factory you had the acquaintance with the machine and you would know how to operate it and you would be fairly skilled. You wouldn’t be specialized—most of them weren’t in mass production anyway where all you did was to pull a lever for a punch press.
Sherna: Now, how did they put people into the training program, can you tell us?
Genora: It was announced in all the projects that if they wanted a transfer from ditch digging or from whatever, it was on the bulletin board. Of the WPA projects where ever you were. At the beginning there weren’t too many women and when I went into it, I think there were only men.
Sherna: Did they stick with it through the whole program?
Genora: The women who were in there with me? Yes, they did. After all they were getting paid.
Sherna: You were getting paid during the training?
Genora: Of course, WPA was paying you for taking this course. It wasn’t the same rate of pay you were getting in a supervisor capacity, but I made it because I had two children. I was preparing to go into a factory as soon as possible, to be one of the first women and again, I don’t remember the year that I left for Detroit when I completed it shortly after.
Sherna: How long was the training session?
Genora: I think it was an eight week course.
Sherna: That was daily?
Genora: Oh yes, five days a week.
Sherna: And were you supporting the children yourself or was Kermit sending you some money for the children?
Genora: No, No, I was supporting myself, I was fully supporting them then.