Kate Richards O'Hare

Carrie Katherine Richards was born March 26, 1876, in Ottawa County, Kansas. Her father, Andrew Richards (c. 1846–1916), was the son of slaveowners who had come to hate the institution, enlisting as a bugler and drummer boy in the Union Army at the outbreak of the American Civil War in 1861.[1] Following the conclusion of the war he had married his childhood sweetheart and moved to the western Kansas frontier, where he and his wife Lucy brought up Kate and her four siblings, raising the children as socialists from an early age.[1]

O'Hare attended Pawnee City Academy in Pawnee City, Nebraska graduating in 1894. O'Hare briefly worked as a teacher in Nebraska before becoming a secretary for, and later part owner of, her father's machinist shop in Kansas City. There she joined the International Association of Machinists and became involved in socialist politics. In 1901, she moved to Girard, Kansas to attend the International School of Social Economy where she met her future husband Frank P. O'Hare. The couple married in 1902 and moved to Chandler, Oklahoma. After moving to Oklahoma, O'Hare began organizing women for the Socialist Party of Oklahoma.[2] In 1907, she was the party's nominee for Oklahoma Commissioner of Charities and Corrections.[3] In 1909, the O'Hares returned to Kansas City.[2]

She unsuccessfully ran as a candidate for the United States Congress in Kansas on the Socialist ticket in 1910.

In the pages of the National Rip-Saw, a St. Louis-based socialist journal in the 1910s, O'Hare championed reforms in favor of the working class and toured the country as an orator. In 1916 the Socialist Party of Missouri named O'Hare its candidate for U.S. Senate, heading the Socialist ticket in the state.[4]

After America's entry into World War I in 1917, O'Hare led the Socialist Party's Committee on War and Militarism. For giving an anti-war speech in Bowman, North Dakota, O'Hare was convicted and sent to prison by federal authorities for violating the Espionage Act of 1917, an act criminalizing interference with recruitment and enlistment of military personnel. With no federal penitentiaries for women existing at the time, she was delivered to Missouri State Penitentiary on a five-year sentence in 1919, but was pardoned in 1920 after a nationwide campaign to secure her release. In prison, O'Hare met the anarchists Emma Goldman and Gabriella Segata Antolini, and worked with them to improve prison conditions.[5]

After her release and the war's end, support for the Amnesty movement waned. In April 1922, to free America's "Political Prisoners" she led the "Children’s Crusade", a cross country march, to prod President Harding to release others convicted of the same 1917 Espionage act she had been convicted. With support of the fledgling ACLU, the women and children stood at the gates of the White House for almost two months before Harding met with them, ultimately releasing many of the prisoners of conscience.[6]

O'Hare, unlike Socialist Party leader Eugene V. Debs and other prominent socialists at the time, did not believe African Americans were equal to white Americans. She did not work toward racial equality, and was concerned about African-American men working in close contact with white American women. However, she was sympathetic to the plight of Native Americans, even though she felt that their sociocultural evolution was too slow for them to thrive in the US. She considered Jewish people to be largely equal to whites, and she occasionally participated in Jewish holiday celebrations with her friends.[7]

Kate O'Hare divorced Frank O'Hare in June 1928 and married the engineer and businessman Charles C. Cunningham in California in November of the same year. Despite her continued involvement in politics, much of O'Hare's prominence gradually faded. O'Hare worked on behalf of Upton Sinclair's radical populist campaign in the 1934 California gubernatorial election, and briefly served on the staff of Wisconsin Progressive Party politician Thomas R. Amlie in 1937–38. Esteemed as a penal reform advocate, she served as an assistant director of the California Department of Penology in 1939–40.

O'Hare died in Benicia, California, on January 10, 1948.