Lawrence textile strike 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. But in her 1934 autobiography,
A Footnote to Folly, Vorse identifies the Lawrence strike as the turning point in her life. The
Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), 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". 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.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. When mass arrests followed the tactic (initiated by a young
Frank Tannenbaum) of invading churches with demands food and shelter, it was at Vorse's apartment on East 11th Street, that Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Bill Hayward,
Carlo Tresca, and others organized a defense committee.
"Heterodite" and suffragist 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. 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. 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".
Feminist opposition to the war After war broke out in Europe, together with Catt,
Alice Hamilton,
Lillian Wald,
Florence Kelley, and other "
Heterodites", 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." When later she reported from Europe, she ignored political and diplomatic events, focusing 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.
Suspect radical 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. In the January 2021 edition of
The Liberator (edited by
Crysta and
Max Eastman) she reported on the fate of "more than one thousand . . . I.W.W. class -war prisoners" and, among those facing lengthy prison sentences, recorded interviews with Haywood,
Ralph Chaplin,
George Hardy, and
Vincent St. John. She concluded that there was but one law in America you break invariably at your own peril: "
Do not attack the profit system"
. 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. There were other aspects of Minor's outlook and behavior, consistent with his adoption of the Moscow party line, 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." 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". In the early 1930s, Vorse recorded the rise of
Hitler in Germany 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 was the state's attack on the Russian peasantry, starved into submission in the wake of
Stalin's forced collectivization. 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."
Chronicler of labor's struggle and racist injustice Vorse had continued reporting on labor unrest during the war. For the New York City weekly,
The Outlook, she covered the efforts of the IWW in the summer of 1916 to coordinate a strike of iron ore miners on the
Mesabi Iron Range. In November 1916,
Alexander Berkman's
anarchist journal
The Blast (San Francisco) carried her report on a bloody
wildcat strike (four workers killed, hundreds wounded) at the
Rockefeller-owned oil refineries in
Bayonne, New Jersey. After the war, labor engaged her both as a reporter and as an activist. 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. In the spring of 1933, in two pieces for
The New Republic, she covered the case of the Scottsboro Boys, nine African American teenagers convicted in a rushed and irregular trial in Alabama for the alleged rape of two young white women on a freight train. In explaining "How Scottsboro Happened", she wrote that the case was "not simply one of race hatred. It arose from the life that was followed by both accusers and accused, girls and boys, white and black", lives "dreary and without hope" and in which virtue was never seen to be rewarded "with anything but work and insecurity." Later that same year, her old Greenwich Village friend
John Collier, the controversial
New Deal commissioner of
Indian Affairs, hired her as 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. 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). Writing about them for The
New Republic'', she may have been "the only reporter who gravitated toward the Women’s Emergency Brigade, a coalition of striking women workers and strikers’ wives who raised hell on the picket lines". That same year, she went on 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. Vorse, then 63, was hit by a ricocheting bullet, and a picture of her pale, bloodied, face was featured in nation’s Sunday newspapers. During the
Second World War, she was America's oldest war reporters. Focusing 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. After the War, she continued working into her eighties. In 1952, she exposed in
Harper’s the political and labor corruption involved in the
Gambino crime family's control the
Brooklyn dockyards, complete with an interview with their hiring boss, vice-president of the
International Longshoremen's Association,
Tony "Bang Bang" Anastasio.
Provincetown Players 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. ==Fiction writer==