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By Root 944 0

enough money to buy Denny a birthday present. Jody’s shoes were so worn out that one of his teachers gave him a pair. Jody was hit by a car and hurt slightly. Denny broke into a house and was subsequently dragged into court. Genora’s frustration was apparent when she wrote to Sol, “Bills, bills, bills. No money. No job yet. And your answer: Come to Flint, come to Flint!”71 It was well and good to be a young and well-known, even important, labor-feminist and social reformer, but Genora paid a price for it.

She was asked to run for a seat on the SWP’s executive committee in Detroit. She did not know whether to seek the office or not; her indecision was triggered by living apart from Sol. Genora told her supplicants that she and Sol did not “want to continue being separated.” The couple could not reach an agreement on either his coming to Detroit or her going to Flint, and so they asked the party to decide for them. The party claimed that it could not “make any such decision.” Genora and Sol would “have to iron out this problem for themselves,” although the party made it clear that it did not want Sol to leave Flint because “no one could replace him,” and it wanted Genora to remain in Detroit. One party wit suggested that the two arrange to meet periodically in Pontiac, a place equidistant between Detroit and Flint.72

Although she relished the thought of serving on the SWP executive committee, Genora chose not to run for the office. She would have been separated from Sol for even longer periods, and, though not admitting it publicly, she yearned for some stability in her life. “I have truly attempted to push my personal wishes and longings into the background,” she wrote to Sol, “and I appreciate the work there [in Flint] to the movement.” With some sarcasm, she wrote, “It [the separation] has been good for you—it has been good for the party. . . . But I cannot see where it would be good for me.”73

Extremely busy in Detroit during the early spring of 1946, she and her colleagues looked forward to a visit from socialist activist Farrell Dobbs. They rejoiced when a court ruled against Briggs for short-paying certain workers who did not meet various production standards. The corporation was ordered to pay $100 to each worker who had been illegally docked.74 Genora educated a union “faction” on its “duty in recruiting and soliciting contributions” for the fund drive.75 Personality clashes had to be dealt with, as unionists and socialists alike showed that they were as capable as any capitalist of getting into political squabbles. Genora—when she was not politicking herself—acted as a peacemaker (an unusual role for her) on more than one occasion. Unemployed but active in Local 212 in Detroit, she lived largely off compensation checks from the federal government. Did she feel any compunction collecting a check from a government whose policies she disagreed with so much? Not at all. This was the “benevolent” side of government; this was what government was supposed to do: protect and defend its citizens in their times of need. On May 6, 1946, Genora went to collect her last check but could not produce her social security card; she had lost it.76 It would take several days, she was told, to get a new one.

The next day, May 7, 1946, she hired on under the name Johnson at Burkharts, a textile firm, using Budd Wheel as a reference but definitely not Briggs. Ingesting huge amounts of cotton dust into her lungs each day, Genora worked ten hours a day at seventy cents an hour.77

This bare subsistence intensified her life on Gladwin Street. She “sure as hell” was not going to “get up every morning at 5:30 and slave away for those stinking wages” so that some of the merchant mariner residents could sleep “till noon and then go shoot the breeze with the boys at the local . . . come home, read the papers, drink coffee and then crawl into bed to read . . . and smoke”—“My bitterness,” she told Sol in understatement, “is beginning to get out of control.”78

A friend told her that Sol’s recruitment for the SWP in Flint would take several years.