Mary Heaton Vorse

Vorse had met O'Brien during the 1912 textile strike in Lawrence, Massachusetts. Barbara Ehrenreich dates the beginning of Vorse's activist writing to the horrors of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire which she witnessed the year before just blocks from her home in Greenwich Village.[8] But in her 1934 autobiography, A Footnote to Folly, Vorse identifies the Lawrence strike as the turning point in her life.[9]

The Industrial Workers of the World, the “Wobblies”, with Elizabeth Gurley Flynn and "Big" Bill Hayward as their principal agents, had shown that a largely female and immigrant workforce could organize. Then a fifteen-year-old mill hand, Fred Beal recalled that, against all expectations, it was the least regarded of the immigrant groups that sustained the strike over two bitterly cold winter months: "the Italians, Poles, Syrians and Franco-Belgians".[10] As she reported for Harper's Magazine on this inter-ethnic solidarity in which women, beaten and arrested, played a leading role, Vorse reflected:

I entered into a way of life I never yet have left. . . . Before Lawrence, I had known a good deal about labor, but I had not felt about it. I had not got angry. In Lawrence I got angry. . . . Some curious synthesis had taken place between my life and that of the workers, some peculiar change that would never again permit me to look with indifference on the fact that riches for the few were made by the misery of the many.[11]

It was in Lawrence that she, and O'Brien, "realized what we must do, that we could make one contribution -- that of writing the workers' story":

We realized, too, that all the laws made for the betterment of workers' lives have their origin with the workers. Hours are shortened, wages go up, conditions are better -- only if the workers protest. We wanted to work with them and write about them. We wanted to break through the silence and isolation which surrounded the workers' lives until everyone understood the conditions under which cloth was made, as we had been made aware.[11]

In the winter of 1913–14, they supported the Wobblies in a protest movement on behalf of New York City's quarter of a million unemployed. When mass arrests followed the tactic (initiated by a young Frank Tannenbaum) of invading churches with demands food and shelter,[12] it was at Vorse's apartment on East 11th Street, that Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Bill Hayward, Carlo Tresca and others organised a defense committee.[13]

In Greenwich Village, to which she had moved after Bert's death, she became a charter member of the Heterodoxy, a community of feminists who had largely met as suffrage workers, among them Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Crystal Eastman, Inez Milholland, Susan Glaspell, Neith Boyce, Sara Josephine Baker, and Ida Rauth.[14][15] By the end of 1910, she was a district chair of the New York City Woman Suffrage Party. In 1913, while on a magazine assignment in Europe to write a series of articles on the development of the Montessori method of education, she was party's delegate to the conference of the International Woman Suffrage Alliance in Budapest.[16]

Unlike Carrie Chapman Catt and others in the party (whose suffrage referendum in 1917 was to result in New York becoming the first eastern state to grant women the ballot), she applauded the direct action tactics associated in Britain with the Pankhursts. To a friend she wrote, "I cannot imagine anything that would affect better the moral health of any country than something which would blast the greatest number of that indecent, immoral institution – the perfect lady – out of doors and set them smashing and rioting".[17]

After war broke out in Europe, together with Catt, Alice Hamilton, Lillian Wald, Florence Kelley,[18] and other "Heterodites",[19] she formed the Woman's Peace Party. In April 1915 the party sent her back across the Atlantic, as one of over 1000 delegates attending the International Congress of Women at The Hague. The Congress led to the creation of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF).[20]

In Europe, Vorse had seen soldiers laughing and drinking on trains carrying them to places where they would kill and be killed. In her diary she wrote: ‘‘There is that which makes man his own enemy and every woman’s. Man takes passionate joy in risking his own life while he takes the life of others. When women’s understanding of this becomes conscious, it is called feminism.”[19]

When later she reported from Europe, she ignored political and diplomatic events, focussing rather on the impact of the war on the civilian population, especially women and children. In June 1919 was back in Budapest, one of the few American reporters to visit Béla Kun's short-lived Communist government in Hungary. Reaching the Soviet Union several weeks before the male reporters from the great American dailies were admitted, she was Moscow correspondent for the Hearst papers during 1921.

Hounded all the way by agents of the Department of Justice, she returned home to report the campaign to free American political prisoners incarcerated during the Red Scare.[19] She also began, regularly, to produce articles on child labour, infant mortality, labour disputes and working-class housing for several newspapers including New York Post and New York World

In November 1919, the Thiel Detective Agency, an anti-union group for hire, informed the Department of Justice that Vorse, along with several anarchists, Wobblies, communists, and AFL leaders, had met in Chicago to advance plans under the leadership of John Reed to overthrow the U.S. government. Vorse was not detained and questioned, but her activities became the subject of weekly and monthly reports to J. Edgar Hoover.

Interest in Vorse peaked as a result of her relationship with the radical political cartoonist and Communist Party functionary Robert Minor and their engagement on behalf of the death-row anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti. Minor helped produce the first Sacco and Vanzetti defense pamphlet, and Vorse, who saw their case as testimony to "the unalterable determination of the employers to smash the workers”, was first to bring it to the attention of the American Civil Liberties Union.[21]

A trip to the Soviet Union in 1919 convinced Minor that Lenin and Trotsky had established “a complete monopoly of news, fact and opinion” in order to silence the “more radical revolutionaries . . . behind the dark cloak of secrecy.” Vorse shared Minor's critical opinion of Bolshevik terror. She likened Lenin's true believers to religious fanatics. She wrote Minor in 1920:

The peculiar stern gloom of the Communist state . . . is not alone the result of blockade and war. It is part and parcel of these people who think that they and they alone have the truth, and who also think they have all the truth there is. . . . The Communists are the chosen people and they have all the insufferable qualities which God’s elect and anointed have always had.[21]

Yet, within a few months after joining her in her Provincetown home, Minor reversed himself. The failure of the world revolution, apparent by 1920, in Minor's view made more splendid the triumph of the proletariat in Russia, and Minor was to serve until his death in 1952 as a pliant functionary in the service of Soviet state policy. From that point, Vorse recalls that “Minor always called me bourgeois” and, only because he never thought "her fit for it", never pressured her to become a Communist Party member.[21]

There were other aspects of Minor's outlook and behaviour, consistent with his new doctrinaire understanding of Soviet Russia, that by 1923 Vorse found no longer tolerable. To her diary she confided that it required of her “something full of effort” to endure his single-minded concentration on revolutionary politics, to the exclusion of most all other enjoyment in living. The American Communist Party, Vorse wrote in her journal, was headed by functionaries with “closed minds, so certain, so dull . . . miserable, pathetic, static. They bore me, bore me, bore me.”[22]

In 1922 her affair with Minor ended when, four-months pregnant with his child, she suffered a miscarriage, and he deserted her for the socialist illustrator Lydia Gibson, "a younger, more politically compliant woman".[19] She recovered from the depression and heavy drinking that followed in Mexico City where she joined the colony of American writers and artists that had assembled around the writer Carleton Beals and was friend and mentor to Dorothy Day who later embraced the Catholic Worker Movement.[23]

In the early 1930s, Vorse recorded the rise of Hitler in Germany ("Unter dem Hakenkreuz") and the consolidation of Stalin's power in the USSR. Vorse was clear that the Soviet Union was a betrayal of her socialist ideals. What horrified her most the state's attack on the Russian peasantry, starved into submission in wake of Stalin's forced collectivisation. She wrote in her diary, in early 1931:

I find myself in a bourgeois frame of mind about the kulaks. [The peasants] for the fault of having a wrong psychology have been killed or sent to forced labor. The moment you get any large group living in virtual slavery (and for ideological reasons) the world should say, ‘Why bathe humanity in blood if we still have to keep enslaved a considerable number of people so that the new civilization can march?’ . . . Who cares which class rules so long as the sum of injustice remains the same?

Later that year she added: “I am a communist because I don’t see anything else to be. But I am a communist who hates Communists and Communism.”[24]

In the interwar years, there was scarcely a major labor dispute or civil-rights campaign on which Vorse did not report. She was publicity director for the Passaic, New Jersey, textile strike of 1926 and in 1929 witnessed the onset of the southern textile war in Gastonia, North Carolina. In 1931, monitoring the Coal War in Harlan County, with Edmund Wilson and Malcolm Cowley she was run out of Kentucky by nightriders. In 1932 she covered the Farmers Holiday Association.strike and the Scottsboro Boys’ appeal. On December 2, the front page of the Washington Post featured a letter to President Herbert Hoover she had signed with Sherwood Anderson, Theodore Dreiser, Malcolm Cowley, Waldo Frank, Robert Morse Lovett, and Edmund Wilson pleading with the government not to respond with violence to the unemployed marching on the city.[25]

In 1933, hired by her old Greenwich Village friend John Collier, the controversial New Deal commissioner of Indian Affairs, she became publicity director for the Indian Bureau and editor of Indians at Work, the Bureau's in-house, biweekly journal. Author of the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934, Collier rejected the policy of inducing Indians to abandon their tribal heritage and assimilate into white society. While in early New Deal Washington, she associated for a time with members of the Ware group, a covert network of Communists later fated to receive wide attention for their connection to the Alger Hiss case.[26]

In 1937, Vorse was in Flint, Michigan, for the pivotal "sit-down strike" of the CIO's United Auto Workers, and, as chronicled in her book Labor's New Millions (1938), went on, that same year, to report on the Little Steel Strike. This saw the CIO embrace black workers; women holding the picket lines under gun fire; and, at the Republic Steel plant in south Chicago plant, the killing of 23 protestors in the Memorial Day Massacre.[27]

By the end of the 1930s she could count among the titles for which she had written: the New York Post, New York World, The Washington Post, McCall's, Harper's Weekly, Atlantic Monthly, The Masses (suppressed in 1917 for its opposition to conscription), New Masses, Common Sense, New Republic, McClure's, Survey, The Delineator, and Ladies' Home Journal as well as various news services.[28]

During the Second World War, she was America's oldest war reporters. Focussing as she had in the First World War on the plight of civilians, she was moved to do extensive work for United Nations Refugee and Resettlement Agency, UNRRA.[29][30] After the War, she continued working into her eighties. In 1959, she made her last major investigative trip, reporting on anti-union violence during a textile strike in Henderson, North Carolina.[31]

In 1915, on her property in Provincetown, Massachusetts, Vorse helped stage the first performance of a repertoire that included Ida Rauh, Susan Glaspell, George Cram Cook, John Reed, Hutchins Hapgood, and Eugene O'Neill. Once established the Provincetown Players move to Greenwich Village, in November 1918 opening their own Provincetown Playhouse with O'Neill's once-act play Where the Cross Is Made.[32]

Vorse had published her first short story in a local newspaper at the age of sixteen. With Albert Vorse's encouragement, at the age of 29 she found herself reeling off short magazine fiction "like a regular phonograph”—typically stories of rugged and energetic heroines who managed to win the affection of a coveted male over a more constrained and conventionally feminine rival.[33] Beginning with The Breaking-In of a Yachtsman’s Wife (1908), her first novels drew on the experiences of her first years of marriage. They blame not only men for failing to understand women, but also women for embracing their own subservience, whether to husbands or to children. Her 1911 novel The Very Little Person emphasizes how little middle-class men were expected to know about children and about women's maternal experiences when a young father is bewildered by the affection he feels for his daughter. The Autobiography of an Elderly Woman, also published in 1911 is a portrait of the pleasures, regrets, and grievances of a middle-class grandmother who fights daily to be her own person.[34]

At this time, Vorse also wrote several ghost stories, including "The Second Wife" (1912).[35][36] The stories were later collected in the Ash-Tree Press volume Sinister Romance : Collected ghost stories.

Vorse's 1915 novel I’ve Come To Stay: A Love Comedy of Bohemia employs “blue serge lining”—a reference to the fabric that protected the inside of tailored coats and suits, forming a barrier between the self and the world—as a metaphor in the struggle of her heroine to break free of a stultifying bourgeois upbringing. Camilla embraces the bohemian culture of Greenwich Village complete with anarchist friends and a Polish violinist lover and rejects the suit of her neighbor, the equally middle-class Ambrose Ingraham, for fear that he will once again wrap her up in blue serge.[34] She describes the excesses of life in the village as an embrace of the "unfulfilled joys which died unborn in our parents' souls" and as casting away of "decencies in our endeavor not to be hypocritical."[37]

Vorse worked on two collaborative, or composite, novels organized by the active suffragist and editor of Harper's Bazaar, Elizabeth Jordan. In 1907 Vorse was one of a dozen authors—among them Henry James and William Dean Howells—who each contributed a chapter to The Whole Family, a multi-generational saga first serialized in Jordan's magazine and then published by Harper's as a book in 1908. The project was originally conceived by Howells as a showpiece of his brand of literary realism.[38] But his vision for the book was disrupted by the agency the women writers insisted on giving the female characters.[39]

In 1917, along with thirteen other authors ready to donate the royalties to the suffragist cause, including Fannie Hurst, Dorothy Canfield Fisher, Alice Duer Miller, Ethel Watts Mumford, Henry Kitchell Webster and William Allen White, Vorse collaborated again with Jordan in The Sturdy Oak. The novel was serialized in Collier's Weekly.[40] and then published as a novel by Henry Holt & Company in 1917.[41] Set in upstate New York, it anticipates the state's 1917 referendum on women's suffrage.[42] Idealistic reformers are pitted against a ruthless political machine, and the traditional picture of man as "the sturdy oak" supporting woman, "the clinging vine", is ridiculed,[43]

With the exception of The Ninth Man (1918), a novel set in 12th-century Italy, her subsequent book-length publications drew on her radical journalism. They vary from compilations recording her coverage of actual events, such as Men and Steel (1920), The Passaic Textile Strike, 1926-1927 (1927), and Labor's New Millions (1938), to novels: Second Cabin (1928) based on her homeward voyage from inflation-ravaged postwar Germany and postrevolutionary Russia.[37] and Strike (1930).[44]

Strike! was the first of several "Gastonia novels" by different writers inspired by the Loray Mill strike of 1929.[45][46] In Gastonia, North Carolina, Fred Beal led the Communist Party's National Textile Workers' Union in a first effort to organize in the union-free South. His counterpart in the novel, Fer Deane, under constant threat of assassination leaves much of the work to Irma Rankin and the chief protagonist Mamie Lewes, characters recognizable as Beal's assistants Vera Buch Weisbord and Ella May Wiggins.

Lewes, like Wiggins, is a working women, a single mother, and the balladeer of the movement. While at the center of the "maternal solidarity" that maintains the strike, she contends on all sides with male presumption. She resists Deane's demand that he be given direction of a strike in which it is the women who “man” the dangerous picket lines, and tires of a middle-class Communist-Party activist from the north who befriends her partly, it seems, for the pleasure of hearing himself lecture. The murder of Wiggins preceded a final police descent upon the strikers' tent city that, in turn, leads to Beal and five co-defendants being convicted of second-degree murder in the death of the local police chief. In the novel (completed before Beal and his co-defendants skipped bail and escaped to the Soviet Union) the death of Lewes leads to the decisive martyrdom of an otherwise indecisive Deane: he joins in the final act of resistance and, with five other men, is killed.[47]

For ten years, from 1932 to 1942, Vorse was a regular short-story contributor to The New Yorker.[48]