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By Root 916 0

and instruction. Before the ballots could be printed, let alone certified, the state legislature passed what became known as the Trucks Act. Taking its cue from the national level, Michigan (along with several other states) moved to curb the activities of subversive individuals and groups within its borders by requiring a loyalty oath to be taken by all political candidates and civil-service workers. As a result, SWP candidates, including Genora, were removed from the Michigan ballot. Both major parties, Democratic and Republican, she claimed, were responsible for the travesty of the Trucks Act. “The SWP will fight this police-state edict. We repudiate the infamous ‘subversive’ label.” Who were the real subversives? They were the “state legislature which passed the law, the Governor who signed it and the Secretary of State who put it into practice.” She threatened to sue “to regain our place on the November ballot in Michigan.” And then she added, “It has become our duty to keep alive the best traditions of American democracy which are rapidly vanishing under the spur of the witch hunt.”13

Genora’s life fluctuated between heady political and union public appearances and health traumas and personal tragedy. In addition to tuberculosis, she developed high blood pressure, and a benign tumor was removed from her right breast.14 In 1950, her father, Ray Albro, died. She and Ray had not always gotten along with one another, especially in earlier days when she thought of him as a capitalist and he thought of her as a revolutionary Trotskyist. As the years passed, however, their relationship had grown into mutual appreciation and love. Genora was closer to her mother, Lora, than anyone else. Losing her in 1949 was difficult (especially after Jody died in 1946), and now losing her father only added to her sadness. Ray Albro died on his way to work at the Buick plant. This was ironic because at one time he owned several photographic stores in Flint and elsewhere and had been relatively well off. Ruined by the Depression, he had gone to work for GM. He had just gotten off a bus when he suffered a fatal heart attack; the only identification on him was his Buick badge.15 Genora, embittered by all the deaths in her family (three in the past four years), wrote a poignant letter to her deceased father:

Next March you would have been 65, Dad, and you were planning to quit because you could get your GM pension. But you didn’t live to receive that pittance because you were literally worked to death, as most workers are before their 65th birthday. . . .

At the next quarter when GM’s huge profits are announced we’ll have the aching knowledge that this time it was our father’s life—and death—that went into the greedy piling up of those profits. And all that GM left for the members of the family is to stand beside a white lined casket and whisper, “Goodbye Dad.”16

Though Genora wrote this letter for the local press, it wound up in the files that the FBI had begun on her and Sol. The government apparently wanted to show how Genora was taking her fight against GM and other big corporations to a personal level. How this made her dangerous to the government, only the bureaucratic mindset of the FBI could explain. Genora seemed increasingly to embrace the thought that an individual’s life was determined more by external forces than his or her own activities and character. She came close to saying that an unbridled, corporate-controlled society killed her father, just as it had her son, Jody, a few years before. But then she had suffered another bereavement, so one must make allowances.

Genora served as her father’s executrix. Going through his effects, she found an old trunk full of books, including the Albro family Bible. The money in the estate provided his heirs (four children: Beatrice, Barbara, Jarvis, and Genora) seven hundred dollars each. Genora and Sol used their share of the inheritance as a down payment on their first house at 1507 Oak Street, in Flint.17

Genora’s trials and tribulations did not stop with Ray’s death. Her son, Denny,