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By Root 949 0

missed the mark as it tried to find the pockets of fluid. Each time this happened, the doctor had to reinsert the long, sharp needle. Hoping to liven up things even just a little, Genora said to Herr Froelich, “I hear you are from Vienna. What do you think about the Karl Marx apartments?” “What do you know about the Karl Marx apartments?” the astonished doctor asked. “I am a Socialist,” she said quietly. “I read about the resistance made to Hitler’s army at these apartments in 1934.”35 The Karl Marx Hof, designed by Karl Ehn, was constructed between 1926 and 1930. The tenants were “socially homogeneous” in a “protective enclave” where they propounded upon the life and principles of Karl Marx. Individual apartments and courtyards were connected through a central building where all their meetings took place.36 A rapport now developed between the famous Austrian doctor and the young neophyte Socialist. Froelich gently nursed her back to health and sent her home to Flint. For the next two years she continued to have pneumothorax treatments as an outpatient at the county hospital. During this time, her attending physician, H. Winchester, arranged for the county government to supply Genora with an extra quart of whole milk a day, believing that it would help in the curative processes. The long periods of treatment gave Genora plenty of time for study, reflection, and reading.

Always the most religious member of the Albro family, she taught Sunday school at the Methodist church and participated in church socials and singing events. While confined to bed during her bouts with TB, she read everything she could find about the world’s religions. She wanted to know how and why religions were created. She read lives of Zoroaster, Christ, Mohammed, and the Buddha, and she studied Bahaism. Steadily she came to realize that the founders of the world’s great religions were simple—not simplistic—people who created beliefs that were noncomplicated. Later, these religions were institutionalized to include beliefs and requirements that had nothing to do with the founders. Human beings created dogma, she reckoned, and dogma was not a perfect persuader. Interspersed with her religious readings was Genora’s study of the various Socialist movements in the world.37 As she read Marx, Lenin, and Trotsky and learned of women labor reformers such as Rose Pesotta, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Rose Schneidermann, and Rose Pastor Stokes, she discovered totally different religious and philosophical worlds from the comfortable one in which she grew up. When she read and heard about the events of the day, including so much labor unrest at GM and elsewhere throughout the country, she began to see what in her own mind was the hardboiled capitalist attitude of management toward labor. Accordingly, she plunged herself into the Socialist activities of the time.

She had been involved intermittently in the Young People’s Socialist League (YPSL). Now she began to attend meetings of the League for Industrial Democracy, where discussion topics ranged from the Molly Maguires to Terence Powderly’s Knights of Labor. Genora, who soon became a mover and shaker of the organization, began to alternate the places where the group met, setting up a chautauqua-type circuit of sending speakers to various locales. These speakers included Norman Thomas, who became the national head of the Socialist Party, and Walter Reuther, who later headed the UAW.

The conditions in and around Flint in the early 1930s were conducive to many labor-management upheavals. Threats of strikes were a daily concern. Political, economic, social, and philosophical ideologies multiplied on a regular basis. Genora recognized the plight of blacks from the South: they lived in corrugated metal huts and tarpaper shacks with no inside plumbing and only primitive toilet facilities. “You wouldn’t think of raising animals in such places,” she snorted, “let alone children.”38 Fie on a government that allowed such conditions, whether it be in the North or the South. If capitalism under Hoover and Roosevelt could not