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Did the Women’s Auxiliary and the EB, then, create a “new woman”? To a considerable degree, yes. It caused more women than before to agree with Genora that all human beings are entitled to get the most they can out of life, that there is dignity in work, and that the wives and daughters of the workingman could also have careers.

When the Great Depression struck in 1929, Genora Albro was sixteen years old and had already committed herself to the idea that government should be helpful to people in need. As the dark years of the Depression creeped by, she began to feel that neither Democrats nor Republicans were ready to take on these domestic responsibilities. Genora Dollinger spent a great many years of her life looking for a party that was ready to take them on.

Three The Lure of Trotskyism

The union victory intensified Genora and her colleagues’ philosophies concerning the roles of huge corporations and big government in American life. Why should it even be necessary for groups of determined workers to have to take on the giant companies to obtain labor equality? Beneath the naïveté of the question lay longtime concerns among social reformers about human nature itself. Was competition or cooperation uppermost in the lives of human beings?

Companies like GM argued that they were involved in capitalistic competition. Reformers, however, going back to sociologist Lester Frank Ward of the late nineteenth century, could argue that if true laissez-faire—which corporations said they wanted—was to be accomplished, the government would truly have to stay hands-off. This meant that the government would have to not only refrain from regulating big business but also cease helping it in the forms of protective tariffs, strike breaking, and tax incentives, particularly on local levels. Corporations did not wish to be regulated by government at any level; but when it came to governments helping them, they were much in favor.

Corporate collusion, which included widespread price-fixing practices, was not, in Genora’s and her followers’ eyes, illustrative of capitalism, for over the years she felt that corporations had tried to destroy capitalism’s main ingredient: competition. Instead of actual competition, there seemed to be a strong adherence to the Machiavellian doctrine that the ends justify the means. Big government gave every appearance of allowing corporations to get away with it. Union people came to believe that trickle-down prosperity, which argues that government support of big business results in financial prosperity seeping down into the economy and smaller businesses, was no more efficacious under Franklin D. Roosevelt than it had been under Herbert Hoover. Under the facade of kindness and helpfulness, the bottom line for the New Deal was trucking to the interests of giant corporations.

Another question growing out the Depression that troubled Genora and her unionmates concerned the purpose and function of the government, especially the federal branch. Was government brought into existence only to regulate its citizens, to make them behave themselves? Or could or should there be a modicum of benevolence? Should government come to the aid of needy citizens, or just simply ignore them? Should it be, as former president Grover Cleveland once said, that “the people support the Government, the Government should not support the people.”1 Here was a Democrat (Cleveland) of the nineteenth century giving sustenance to a Republican (Hoover) in the early twentieth century.

It was within these political and philosophical parameters that Genora spent the immediate post-sit-down, pre–World War II years. She sought answers to the questions promulgated by her father-in-law, Carl Johnson, and to her newly found interests in the revolutionary ideas of Leon Trotsky. She put her version of the answers into the context of continued activities on behalf of unionism (primarily the UAW) and what she considered to be social justice. As the sit-downs ended, she was famous throughout