L a b o r
H i sto ry
The Flint Sit-Down Strike of 1936–1937
Remembered in oral histories by the participants
Catherine Smith
Editor’s note: This article had its birth in the book Witnesses and Warriors, a 1999 project of faculty members
at Mott Community College. There was also an exhibition of original art—painting, sculpture, prints, and other
media—that depicts the strike’s participants and events. The United Automobile Workers Region 1-C and the Mott
Community College Foundation supported the project.
E
What did the Flint sit-down
strike mean?
• It was part of the first real test of the new
National Labor Relations Act’s granting
workers the right to collectively bargain with
their employers.
• The strike would not have been successful
without the intervention of President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Michigan Governor
Frank Murphy.
• The Flint strike that spread to GM plants all
over the country leveled the playing field
for labor and management. That field is no
longer level.
ighty years ago, Congress
passed the National Labor Relations Act, making it illegal
for an employer to discriminate
against workers who organized for the
purpose of collective bargaining. Without the protection of the Wagner Act,
the Flint Sit-Down Strike, which began
in 1936, may not have succeeded. Prior
to the success of the strike, workers had
no voice in changing the deplorable
conditions in the plants—long hours,
foul air, unbearable heat, body-wrenching assembly-line speedups, dangerous
machinery, unfair piecework pay, and
abusive bosses.
Following are the words of some of
those men and women who worked in
Flint plants and participated in this historic strike. Their stories are culled from
three archives. The last interviews took
place in 1999 and resulted in an exhibition of portraits of surviving sit-downers
in Flint, Michigan. The catalog titled
Witnesses and Warriors tells the story of
the strike in the workers’ own words and
includes images of those portraits.
Conditions Before the Strike
Jack Foust: I remember [my father] coming home from work when I was a
34
PERSPECTIVES ON WORK / 2015
kid. … And he’d sit down on the front
porch and fall asleep. … My mother and
my grandmother would take his shoes
off, and his socks would be bloody.
Lena Demzik: In the summertime
we’d take hankies or cloth and wet ‘em,
put ‘em around our neck or over our
face. … There were fumes … that made
people sick. … You needed a job, so you
did it.
J.D. Dotson: If you tell ‘em you were
sick, they’d say, “Die and prove it.”
Estelle Hodges: I was cleaning cores …
[made of] sand. … It could cut you to
pieces, it was so sharp. … [M]y husband
left me, so I needed the job. I had two
children.
Joseph Martinus: You couldn’t get a
drink of water if you wanted a drink of
water. You couldn’t leave your line… You
couldn’t even go to the bathroom. What
I mean, you was tied down that closely.
Jim Londrigan: After you worked
about seven hours … you were about
half dead. … After seven hours the supervision had the privilege, if they didn’t
have enough of production, to speed up
those lines. So that last two hours, those
lines were moving.
Charlie White: If I’d get behind—I
remember one general foreman we had
The Early Union
Young striker off sentry duty sleeping on assembly line of
auto seats.
Sit-down strike at Fisher Body plant in Flint, Michigan,
during the strike of 1937.
Sit-down strikers guarding window entrance to Fisher Body
plant 3.
there … he’d take me down to the window and say, “Look out there.” (There
were five hundred men out there all the
time.) “Every one of those men would
like to have your job.”
Richard Wiecorek: I heard a lot of
guys say, “I’ll bring you a bushel of
potatoes. …” We called ‘em brownies.
He’d see a foreman coming, he’d fumble
around in his bucket. He had a nice big
apple and he’d give it to the boss. And he
was hungry himself.
Bernice Tanner: The boss come out
to the house to see your wife. If things
didn’t suit him, you lost your job. …
Norman Bissell: They would say, “On
Saturday you come in and work a half
a day. And you donate that time to
[charity].”
Howard Washburn: [Your pay] was
all piecework. Say your production was
set at say, three hundred an hour. Well,
you had to run three hundred an hour to
make your base rate … But if you run …
three hundred and fifty an hour, you’d
make extra money. … But then maybe in
two or three months … instead of saying,
“We’re gonna cut your wages,” they’d
just tell you to run more pieces.
Ernest Barcey: Out where we lived,
in shantytown, all you had was outside
toilets, your water was what you dug out
of the ground.
Laura Hayward: You didn’t know
about anybody getting any money. But
I had an hourly rate. … The high was
fifteen cents an hour. … But there used
to be an old head at General Motors …
and he said that ten cents an hour was
enough for any woman to make.
Robert Keith: If you know what the
farmworkers have went through for the
last years, when they go from crop to
crop … that’s the way the automobile
workers used to be. Because none of these
shops shut down [to retool for the new
model year] at the same time. … So they’d
go wherever they could make the most
money. … There was very few people in
that shop even owned a home in this town.
In an attempt to stop the rise of unions
after the passage of the National Labor
Relations Act, General Motors set up
their own company unions. These differed from the AFL trade unions, with
which the UAW first affiliated, but spies
infiltrated both of these early organizations. Workers hesitated to join for fear
of being exposed and losing their jobs.
Laura Hayward: When my husband
started. … they had the AFL. And every
time anybody joined, their names was
given to the upper echelon.
Maynard (Red) Mundale: “We got a
new organization.” [Burt Harris] said,
“This is not the AFL,” because you
couldn’t have sold the AFL to any of
these boys. … I had got hit over the head
with clubs when them cops come down
there on horseback at Fisher 1…. [The
AFL] had sold us down the river … in
’30 and ’34.
The AFL’s organizing efforts had concentrated on skilled workers, grouped
according to their particular trades, ignoring the mass of unskilled production
workers. In contrast, the CIO unions
organized all the skilled and unskilled
workers within an industry into a single,
powerful union. The UAW later joined
with the CIO.
Robert Keith: The CIO is an industrial
union. … But the reason we got beat in
1934, we tried to organize it on a trade
basis. … If you don’t go after the lowpaid people you can never organize ‘em.
In September 1936, Bob Travis became chief organizer in Flint and enlisted
the help of Roy Reuther. By protecting
the identities of union members and exposing spies, the two persuaded workers
to join the union in greater numbers.
J.D. Dotson: Bob [Travis] called a
meeting. … And he told ‘em that under
the Wagner Act. … that any time a person got fired [for attending a union meeting] he would be reinstated back on his
job with pay. … That give … the people
more courage.
PERSPECTIVES ON WORK / 2015
35
The Flint Sit-Down Strike of 1936–1937
Jim Ligouri: Sunday morning we had
maybe ten, twelve, fifteen of us. … They
had these little books with covers tore
off and he’d tell us what we should be
getting for your “labor power”. … He
said they make their money off our
“labor power,” and they’re not paying
us enough. This is what we should be
getting. You add up the clothing, your
phone, your utilities, your rent and you
divide it by forty. … Then he said, “you
add ten percent for your incidentals.”
And that’s what you should be getting,
not what they want to pay.
The Beginning of the Strike
This bronze of Nellie Besson Simons
by Catherine Smith was part of the
exhibition mounted in Flint, Michigan,
with the publication of Witnesses and
Warriors in 1999. Simons began working on a punch press in 1936 at nineteen years old. Reported for attending
a union meeting, she was fired. This
irked her, and she began organizing.
During the sit-down strike, she was a
lieutenant in the Women’s Emergency
Brigade, which played a key role in
the success of the strike. She was
one of five women who locked arms
and strung themselves across the
entrance to Chevy 4 during the takeover of the plant.
Bud Simons: Bob [Travis] had a couple
of candles setting on the table, just bright
enough so that the organizers could be
seen, and it was just darker than hell in
that basement, and he had black rags
over all the windows and they told them
that they would not be recognized. …
This made the workers realize that these
people meant business and they were not
trying to get you exposed.
36
The fledging union found itself negotiating grievances through loosely-organized
locals. Automakers such as General Motors refused to bargain on a national
level. The UAW-CIO sought recognition
of the union to settle such issues as collective bargaining, seniority, speed of
work, and pay rates for all the plants
owned by one corporation.
A series of strikes in key plants could
cripple the industry and lead to this recognition. The union targeted GM (rather
than the more aggressively anti-union Ford
Motor Company) and particularly the
Fisher Body plants in Cleveland and Flint,
on which three-fourths of GM production
depended. Even though the union had
planned to wait until the first of the year to
call strikes, Cleveland Fisher Body workers
struck on December 28, 1936, with only a
few hundred workers staying inside.
On the morning of December 30, the
strike started when union members at
Fisher 2 in Flint openly displayed their
union buttons. They normally wore them
inside their pockets. On the same day,
workers at Fisher 1 joined the strike.
There were only two sets of dies. One
was at Fisher 1 in Flint, and the other
was in Cleveland. When word came that
GM was going to remove the dies, the
strike was on.
Maynard (Red) Mundale: Roy Reuther said, “Why don’t you guys all put
PERSPECTIVES ON WORK / 2015
your buttons on tomorrow and walk in
there with your union button?” [He] definitely told us, “Don’t leave the plant. …
The only way we’re going to break it, is
for you people to hold the plants, ‘cause
if you don’t, it’ll be the same thing as has
happened year after year, time after time,
and they’re gonna ride you down. … All
of these foremen saw all of these union
buttons. [One of the foremen told two
workers who were inspectors] “You boys
will have to take your union buttons
off … or [you]’re fired. ” I said, “Okay,
that’s it. And that thing [Fisher 2] went
down just like that. “
Bud Simons: Burt Harris started yelling, “Hey, they’re loading up dies out
there in the boxcar, we’d better do something!” So Bob Travis said, “That’s it!”
He said, “We’ll shut her [Fisher 1] down!”
Lester Kenney: When we pulled that
[strike at Fisher 1] … people was jumping out of the windows to go on home.
We had a hang of a time to maintain a
few in the factory. … We blocked all the
doors. We took the plant protection and
walked them out. And so we had command of the gates and the whole thing,
see. It was a rough deal there for a while.
John Yorko: It started in our department with the metal shop. … And it just
spread all the way through the whole
shop. Then Bud Simons was the one that
called the meeting in the cafeteria and
explained what we were up against. …
Those that got some problems at home
will be excused. And after some of the
excuses were given he said, “I didn’t
realize there were that many pregnant
women in Flint.” So, they let ‘em go.
Feeding the Strikers
Mary Nightingale: We worked the night
because we left everything ready for the
day shift, see. We done mostly big pans
of soup, baked potatoes and bread and
butter.
Carl French: They first put up a big
long ladder to bring the food. Well, they
finally took that down. So they put a
rope and tied the food to take it up. …
This window was open so all I had to do is
just stick but one leg in. Well soon as I
did, the sheriff saw me and the guys inside
grabbed me and the sheriff got me. …
They pulled me back and forth across
that little short thing back there. So I
said to the guys, “Please turn me loose.
I’m hurting.” They turned me loose and
boy I got myself out of there in a hurry.
Marian Snyder: There was a New
Year’s Eve party planned. So we just went
down to the plant and called to him up at
the windows. We had a big basket. And
I had known one of the security guards
from school so I kept him occupied while
Al dropped a rope down from the second
floor. … I ran and tied the basket on that
so they had some food. And I’d write a
note, probably a love letter in those days.
We were just married.
Early Attempts to End the Strike
On January 2, 1937, Judge Edward
Black granted an injunction to evict the
strikers, but when it was learned that he
owned $219,900 worth of GM stock,
it was not enforced. The next day, 200
delegates of the UAW met in Flint to
authorize the strike and draft a list of demands for improved working conditions
and recognition of the union. An end to
piecework, a guaranteed hourly wage,
input onto assembly line speed, a thirtyhour week, and a six-hour day were
among the concessions asked of GM.
Protecting the Strikers
Elden Coale: I was what they called special patrol. Every hour we went around
to make sure everything was alright. …
Some of the guys used to work in the mill
and they’d turn some billy clubs out. And
we’d carry a billy club and a blackjack.
Lloyd Berdan: The small doors were
welded shut. You had to come through
the window. If we were attacked, I was
on the second floor on a fire hose. And
that fire hose could squirt enough power
to knock a man down. And on the third
floor the guys would be there, if we were
attacked, had the hinges to throw.
Genora Johnson Dollinger: We found
it necessary to form a military formation
within the [Women’s Auxiliary]. And so
we decided to have a captain and five
lieutenants of this Women’s Emergency
Brigade that be thrown into strike action where there were threats against the
pickets lines or battles.
The Battle of Bulls’ Run
On January 11, the decision by GM to
cut off food and heat in Fisher 2 sparked
a violent confrontation among the Flint
police, the strikers inside the plant, and
a crowd of union sympathizers. It was
sixteen degrees outside at noon when
the heat was turned off. When people
brought food at 6 p.m., they found the
gate locked. A band of twenty men went
down to the gate to demand the key.
When guards refused, the men forced the
gate open.
Continued on page 88
book
notice
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Philip Taylor
Edward Elgar Publishing, 2013. 336 pp.
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For an excerpt, go to: http://www.amazon.com/Older-Workers-AgeingSociety-Globalization/dp/1782540091.
PERSPECTIVES ON WORK / 2015
37
The Flint Sit-Down Strike of 1936–1937
After a brief period of calm, thirty
police with tear gas arrived on the scene.
The strikers, armed only with hinges and
fire hoses against a barrage of bullets and
tear gas, were eventually able to drive off
the police. The strikers called it the Battle
of Bulls’ Run.
Lester Kenney: The vigilante group
was coming over the overpass into Fisher
2 to try to get us out. And then Bob Travis give orders to “man your place.” And
all the hinges started to fly.
Jim Ligouri: Then finally later on [the
police] were firing tear gas and buckshot
at us. … Then Victor Reuther came. And
we took [Sheriff] Wolcott’s car and we
put it across the road. And we put all
these cars around the loud-speaking car
because Reuther was in there. And he
was telling you which shells you could
pick up and throw back and which shells
you could burn out with water.
Genora Johnson Dollinger: I was
frightened and you first lose all your
power of thinking for just a matter of
moments and then you become terribly,
terribly angry that armed policemen are
shooting into unarmed men. And [from
the loudspeaker car] I said, “Do you
know that these cops who are cowards
enough to fire into unarmed men?” and I
said, “Now I am making a plea for all of
you women up there to come down and
stand beside us.” And this became the
end of the battle. … They did not want to
shoot women in the back as they started
breaking through.
The National Guard Comes to Flint
Jim Ligouri: So after the Battle of Bulls’
Run, the cops couldn’t patrol the streets
any more because nobody had any respect for them. … So finally, [Gov.] Frank
Murphy sent in the National Guard.
Howard Washburn: Frank [Murphy],
as far as I’m concerned, he was one of the
greatest governors we ever had. We was
lucky that he was in there at the time.
Because when they sent soldiers around,
88
Continued from page 37
Frank Murphy
you know he said he wasn’t sending them
over here to take the people out of the
plant. He was sending ‘em here to keep
the peace.
The Double Cross
On January 11, 1937, GM and the UAW
reached a tentative agreement. Workers in
Cleveland, Anderson, Detroit, and Flint
would evacuate the plants, and GM agreed
not to resume production until issues were
resolved. Flint strikers had not yet left
the plants when GM called strikers in the
other plants back to work, indicating that
the corporation did not plan to uphold
the deal. Flint sit-downers stayed put and
would remain inside another month.
The Diversion
On February 1, 1937, the UAW leadership devised a plan to occupy Chevy
4. This engine plant was vital to GM
production.
Genora Johnson Dollinger: They deliberately issued [the plan] to a known
PERSPECTIVES ON WORK / 2015
stool pigeon. They carefully went over
the plans of taking Plant 9. Nothing was
mentioned about Plant 4.
Tom Klasey: [At Chevy 9], I was
watching the clock. When it come twenty
after I told ‘em, “Now!”
Larry Huber: All of a sudden the
hollering started. “They’re gassing us,
they’re gassing us!” We all run across
the street with sticks breaking out the
windows. We thought they were taking
over the plant, but, this was a diversion.
Nellie Simons: Then, Genora [Johnson Dollinger] and the rest of us lieutenants [in the Women’s Emergency Brigade] went for a stroll down to Chevrolet
4. She knew that they were gonna take 4.
Somebody hollered, “Hold them gates.”
So, we strung ourselves across the gate
and interlocked our arms.
Before we got help, there was a bunch
of police down there harassing us and trying to move us. All at once we heard this
shouting and this singing and we looked
up at the top of the hill and here come the
women and the men with them. It was the
most beautiful sight in the world.
Jacob Hutton: It was kind of a complete surprise. They just says, “Fall in
line.” And we went marching around
through the plant [Chevy 4]. Roy Reuther said, “Now calm down. We’ve got
the plant held.”
Ruth Van Zandt: A white man encouraged [my uncle Roscoe Van Zandt]
to stay [in Chevy 4 during the sit-down]
because they would have let him out.
At that time they would not have cared
anything about a black person staying
because the blacks at that time … all
they were was sweepers or worked in the
foundry, because that’s the only jobs they
could have.
The End of the Strike
On February 2, 1937, Judge Paul Gadola granted another injunction to evict the
sit-downers and fined the union $15 million. Fearing that vigilantes or guards-
men bolstered by the Gadola injunction
might try to evict the strikers, 10,000
union supporters gathered outside of
Fisher 1. Talks resumed February 3 after
President Franklin D. Roosevelt made it
clear through Governor Murphy that he
preferred a negotiated settlement to forcibly evicting the strikers.
On February 11, 1937, the strike
ended. General Motors agreed to recognize the UAW as the collective bargaining
agency for its workers and affirmed the
right of employees to join a labor organization without fear of retribution.
Shirley Foster: It was a gray February
day. Suddenly in the distance we heard
them singing, “Solidarity Forever.” And
the song grew louder and people along
the sides got so excited. Remember,
they’d been out for forty-four days! And
they had been told that they had won
which made it suddenly a reason to be
excited and to cheer about. And then it
was an enormous celebration all over the
city that night. Flint would never know
a feeling just like that again. Because it
was the first breakthrough, and it was
a national … almost an international
breakthrough.
In Retrospect
Today, we have much to thank the sitdowners and their supporters for. Those
inside the plants persevered for fortyfour days despite the fear of vigilantes
or police overtaking them, the lack of
sufficient heat in the plants in the coldest
month of the year, and the separation
from family members. Community members exposed themselves to attack when
bringing food to the plants or when picketing outside.
The optimism created after the Flint
sit-down led to thousands of sit-downs
all over the country, which in turn, led
to higher wages and better working
conditions for all workers. Most of the
plants where the Flint strikes took place
have been torn down as production has
moved overseas and Flint has continued
to deteriorate.
F urther R eading
Bernstein, Irving, “The Emergence of the
UAW,” The History of the American
Worker, 1933-1941, Turbulent Years,
Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company,
1970.
Fine, Sidney, Sit-down: The General Motors
Strike of 1936-1937, Ann Arbor: The
University of Michigan Press, 1970.
Franklin D. Roosevelt
Even after the strike, many rocky
days lay ahead during the process of developing grievance procedures. Multiple
mini-strikes left workers and their families financially insecure. Despite these
continued difficulties, membership in the
union soared after the strike. In 1937
there were close to 400,000 members in
the UAW.
The dedication of the strikers would
not have been enough without the National Labor Relations Act and the support of President Roosevelt and Governor Frank Murphy (later a U.S. Attorney
General and Supreme Court Justice),
who insisted on a peaceful negotiated
settlement rather than the violent eviction of the strikers. The existence of a
democratic political system in which
workers can elect representatives to support their causes was essential to the
early successes of labor unions such as
the UAW.
Karman, Thomas A., “The Flint Sit-Down
Strike,” Michigan History, Vol. 2, No.
2, June 1962.
Kraus, Henry, The Many and the Few, Los
Angeles: The Plantin Press, 1947.
McFarlane, Romatz, and Smith, eds., The
Flint Sit-Down Strike of 1936-1937:
Witnesses and Warriors Flint, Mich.:
Mott Community College, 1999. Available at Region 1-C, UAW, Flint, Mich.
Reuther, Victor, The Reuther Brothers and the
Story of the UAW: A Memoir, Boston:
Houghton Mifflin Company, 1976.
Catherine Smith
Catherine Smith organized an exhibit and produced a catalog
of portraits of Flint sit-downers in 1999. Together with Wilma
Romatz and Jan McFarlane, the three professors from Mott
Community College interviewed more than fifty people associated
with the strike. Smith is an artist and writer and currently lives in
Worcester, Massachusetts. She is also the author of Women in
Pants: Manly Maidens, Cowgirls and Other Renegades.
PERSPECTIVES ON WORK / 2015
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