Not Automatic

The United Auto Workers has been a central actor in the American labor movement since the 1930s. To understand the roots of this powerful institution, we are fortunate to have "Not Automatic: Women and the Left in the Forging of the United Auto Workers' Union" at our disposal. Co-authored by Sol Dollinger and the late Genora Johnson Dollinger, who were husband and wife as well as participants in the heroic days of the UAW, this is a book that should compel the attention of anybody trying to create a fighting labor movement today.

Among the many virtues of "Not Automatic" is a kind of closely observed description of working class life that we associate with the writings of E.P. Thompson. This is particularly true in the portrait drawn of conditions prior to the rise of the CIO, when a desperate unorganized work force had to choose between terrible working conditions at low pay, or no job at all.

Chapter 12 ("Striking Flint, Genora Dollinger Remembers the 1937 Sitdown"), that first appeared as an oral history conducted by Susan Rosenthal in February 1995, draws a portrait from "The Grapes of Wrath":

"Conditions in Flint before the strike were very, very depressing for working people. We had a large influx of workers come into the city from the deep South. They came north to find jobs, because there was no work back home. They came with their furniture strapped on old jalopies and they’d move into the cheapest housing that they could find. Usually these were just little one- or two-room structures with no inside plumbing and no inside heating arrangements. They just had kerosene heaters to heat their wash water, their bath water, and their homes. You could smell kerosene all over their clothing. They were very poor."

Taking the first step toward organizing a union required exceptional courage. General Motors hired lip-readers to spy on workers talking among themselves inside the plant. If they detected the word 'union,' they would inform the boss who would fire the offender on the spot. One of the Dollingers' friends, a comrade in the Socialist Party who wore a UAW button into the Chevrolet plant, was fired even before he got to the line. If you went into a saloon after work and talked unions, you risked a beating from GM-hired thugs.

"Not Automatic" teaches a valuable lesson: the trade union leadership does not have to be transformed in order for rank-and-file workers to assert themselves. The nominal head of the UAW during the 1937 Flint sitdowns was one Homer Martin, whom the authors describe as an "expert on the bible" and a Baptist minister before becoming an auto worker at a Kansas City GM. As a trained orator, Martin had a natural appeal for the recently arrived Southern workers.

Socialists, rather than top officials like Martin, were the true leaders in Flint. After the courts banned factory occupations on February 2, 1937, union organizer Robert Travis called for help from the labor movement in Michigan and Ohio. Although it was not widely known at the time, Travis was a member of the Communist Party. Through his connections on the left and in the labor movement, he was able to recruit sympathizers by the hundreds. Joining local union supporters, they formed a mile-long picket line that surrounded the plant.

Genora Johnson, who at the time of the strike was married to auto worker Kermit Johnson, led another important support group, the Women's Auxiliary Brigade of Flint that numbered about a thousand members. The Johnsons were members of the Socialist Party at the time, which had moved sharply to the left during the Depression. The Socialist Party also included many Trotskyists who had entered the party as a group upon the recommendation of Leon Trotsky, who believed that the leftward moving SP's could be won to revolutionary ideas.

The auto union was a hotbed of radical politics at the time. Homer Martin, seeking allies in his fight to isolate the Communists, turned to Jay Lovestone--the leader of a group bitterly opposed to the CP. After firing Communist Henry Kraus as editor of the union newspaper, Martin replaced him with the Lovestoneite William Munger. You could also find the Proletarian Party, which included future UAW leader Emil Mazey, the DeLeonite Socialist Labor Party, the IWW and many independent radicals in the ranks of the union movement.

Drawing upon her experience in the Socialist Party, Genora Dollinger explains how these groups reached out to workers. In contrast to the fractiousness of the 1960s and 70s, it is notable how the various groups were able to work shoulder to shoulder. Undoubtedly this kind of fraternalism would have a lot to do with the success of the strike:

"A considerable amount of preparatory work was done before the strike by radical parties. We had several very active organizations in Flint and Detroit: the Communist Party, the Proletarian Party, the Socialist Party, the Socialist Party and the Industrial Workers of the World. with the exception of the Communist Party, we all had our headquarters in the Pengelly Building, a very old building that became the strike headquarters of the whole United Automobile Workers Union Flint. Even as the strike was going on, we still had our rooms on the second floor, while the main activities in the auditorium were on third floor. Two years before the strike broke out, the Socialist Party in Flint organized the League for Industrial Democracy (LID). We held meetings in garages and in basements, secret meetings, so the people wouldn’t get caught and beaten up.

"As we got bigger, the Socialist Party started sending us their speakers from New York. Many of them were from the Brookwood Labor College. We put out leaflets and sold tickets for these meetings, which were held in the basement of the biggest Methodist church and in the Masonic Temple. We held lectures in socialism mainly, plus labor history and current events, focusing on what was happening politically Those were very popular meetings. We would get three and four hundred people at some of our meetings."

Unlike recent academic theorizing about the relationship between class, race and gender, "Not Automatic" makes concrete how the CIO revolt fought to unite disparate groups. For example, one of the biggest obstacles to success was hostility to trade unionism by certain conservative layers in the Black church and traditional civil rights organizations. Unless these forces could be won over or at least neutralized, collective action would be jeopardized by the threat of scabs recruited from the ranks of the Black unemployed. Since many of the white rank-and-file auto workers had come up from the South harboring racial prejudices, the auto union radicals had a big job on their hands.

Since Ford Motor had a 'progressive' reputation for hiring Black workers, the job was even more complicated. As the largest employer of Blacks in Detroit, it was not doing them any particular favors since most were in the foundry doing the dirtiest and most dangerous work. In a meeting with the Detroit NAACP in April 1941 union leaders promised that henceforth it would be union policy to seek promotion for Black workers, from janitorial to all classifications of work. However, Black workers remained suspicious and even refused to walk out on strike after NAACP leader Walter White drove around in a sound truck urging support for the UAW.

Although Black workers tended to remain aloof from the union, the organized left did everything it could to make them feel welcome. During the Flint sitdown strikes, there was only one Black participant--an older man named Roscoe Van Zandt. Unlike Ford, General Motors had a policy of only hiring whites for the better-paying production line jobs. When striking southern white workers discovered Van Zandt in their ranks, all they could say was, "What the hell are you doing here? You haven't got any job to protect."

Kermit Johnson educated these workers in the crucible of struggle. After patiently explaining how racism divided workers, the strikers voted to reserve the best sleeping spot and the only blanket for Van Zandt. When it came time for the victory parade, they chose him to carry the union flag. Genora Johnson--on a speaking tour of the Black community with Van Zandt following the strike--was deeply moved by the response as shouts of "Amen, Amen, you said it sister!" interrupted her talk.

Reaching women proved difficult as well. As leader of the Women's Auxiliary, Genora Johnson helped to foster trade union consciousness among many women who had been hostile to the idea of strikes. In the final days of December 1936, when the sitdowns began, she was amazed at the number of wives who came down to the picket line to berate their husbands, "If you don't cut out that foolishness and get out of that plant right now, you'll be a divorced man!"

Since the UAW itself was itself in the early stages of formation, Genora had an easier time forming a Woman's Auxiliary. Rigid organizational structures did not exist yet and the general spirit of revolt encouraged grass roots initiatives. A day care center proved critical:

"We organized a child-care center at the union headquarters, so children would have some place to go when their mothers marched on the picket line. Wilma McCartney, who had nine children and was going to have her tenth, took charge of that. At first, the women were scared to death to come down to the union, and some may have been against the union for taking away their pay check so they couldn’t feed their children who were hungry or crying for milk. Then this wonderful woman, this mother of nine children who was pregnant with another, would talk to them about how it would benefit them for their husbands to participate actively And if they won the strike, it would make all the difference in the world in their living conditions. We recruited a lot of women just through the child-care center."

Out of this initial base, a fighting detachment of pro-trade union women had a decisive impact on the fate of the Flint sitdown strikes. The women's Emergency Brigade entered the battle shortly after four thousand National Guardsmen had been mobilized to put down the strike. Four hundred women volunteered to beef up the picket lines and Genora Dollinger saw to it that they were organized on a military basis. They wore red armbands with a white "W.B" on them for Emergency Brigade. Genora recalls, "We carried clubs with handles carved to fit a woman's grip. Whenever you saw one of those women, you knew she was ready for action at any time, morning, night, or anytime."

"Not Automatic" makes it clear that as the witch-hunt drove out the radicals, the potential for defending wages and working conditions as well as the rights of women and minorities diminished. Since the witch-hunt in the United States has been so closely identified with the persecution of the Communist Party, there has been a tendency among some younger scholars to equate all that was progressive about the 1930s and 40s with the party. To a large extent this can be explained as a healthy reaction to Cold War inspired scholarship on the Communist Party that treated it simply as a pawn controlled by the Kremlin in pursuit of its foreign policy interests.

While it is certainly true that the Communist Party played an important role in the formation of the UAW, it is also true that they did not act alone. Socialist Party activists like Kermit Johnson, Proletarian Party members like Emil Mazey, and others also played key roles. It is no accident that an ecumenical spirit defines "Not Automatic." The Dollingers were part of a group that--after breaking with the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party in 1954--worked to construct a broad, nonsectarian Marxist movement in the United States. Until 1959, they worked with a monthly magazine titled "American Socialist" that was edited by Bert Cochran, who had headed up the Trotskyist fraction in the UAW, and Harry Braverman, who would go on to write "Labor and Monopoly Capital".

Keeping in mind that the SWP viewed the Cochran-Braverman group as soft on Stalinism, the last thing one might expect from a book written by members of this group is a desire to score narrow factional points against the CPUSA. To put it bluntly, the SWP could never understand is that the Cochranites sought above all to transcend the kind of sectarianism that had divided the left historically. They were not "soft" on Stalinism; they were tough on the question on the need for broad left unity. It was no accident that Paul Sweezy was an occasional contributor to American Socialist and that Harry Braverman joined him at Monthly Review in the 1960s after the American Socialist ceased publication. Both journals represented attempts to break with dead-end factionalism.

Chapter 14 (Who Led the Flint Sitdown to Victory? On the Rewriting of History) specifically addresses the systematic and politically motivated effort to minimize the role of non-Communist activists. Turning a sharply critical eye to the work of Communist Henry Kraus and radical historian Roger Keeran, "Not Automatic" characterizes it as simultaneously inflating the role of the CP and diminishing that of the SP.

Rather than denigrating the CP, Dollinger simply restores the SP to its proper place in the Flint sitdown strikes. For example, the strategy to shut down Chevrolet Plant 4 in 1937 was first proposed by the 24 year old Kermit Johnson, who was chairman of the citywide strike committee. When Kermit discussed his tactical plans with his wife Genora, they agreed that it would be useful to launch a diversionary attack on another GM plant. The Johnsons made their proposal to the local Socialist Party membership, which included fellow party-member Walter Reuther who was in town for consultations. Reuther opposed the plan as being too risky and helped to sway the local membership against voting for the plan. Possibly anticipating his later trajectory, Reuther said, "The union has to learn to crawl before it walks."

That night Genora Johnson typed a two page letter to Norman Thomas appealing for his aid in overturning the local SP decision. Thomas wisely turned the matter over to Frank Trager, the party's Labor Secretary. When Trager came to Flint to review the situation, he was swept up by the militancy of the rank-and-file and decided to throw his lot in with the Johnsons. Now that the Flint SP was behind the Johnsons' battle plan, the whole weight of the national party would be brought to bear. The overbearing Walter Reuther warned Kermit Johnson, "If this fails, the responsibility will fall on your head."

As it turned out, Kermit and Genora Johnson's plan worked and the rest was history. Part of the task of rebuilding a reinvigorated labor movement in this country will entail studying our past. For a valuable lesson in the best traditions of the labor movement, Sol and Genora Johnson Dollinger's "Not Automatic" is a great place to start.