Mary Heaton Vorse (October 11, 1874 – June 14, 1966) was an American journalist and novelist with commitments to the labor and feminist movements. She established her reputation as a journalist reporting the labor protests of a largely female and immigrant workforce in the east-coast textile industry. Her later fiction drew on this material profiling the social and domestic struggles of working women. Unwilling to be a disinterested observer, she participated in labor and civil protests. After returning as correspondent from Bolshevik Russia she was for a period the subject of regular US Justice Department surveillance.
Early life Mary Heaton was born October 11, 1874, in New York City to Ellen and Hiram Heaton. Her father was a successful hotelier, but the family's fortune, which was considerable, was her mother's legacy as the widow of Captain Charles Bernard Marvin, a shipping magnate and liquor merchant.
From the family home in Amherst, a college town in western Massachusetts, she travelled extensively with her parents. They variously wintered in California and in Europe: she attended kindergarten in Hanover and the first year of grade school in Dresden. While her father encouraged an interest in history, her mother was sufficiently unconventional to induce a disdain for the restrictions of ladies' fashion (Ellen Heaton was a supporter of the women's dress reform movement) and to indulge her daughter in the study of art, first in Paris and then, in 1896, at the Art Students' League in New York City. While Mary found participation in the artistic avant-garde exhilarating, she was herself to conclude that she had only modest talents as a visual artist.
Marriages and children In 1898, Mary Heaton met and married Albert White Vorse, a thirty-two-year-old newspaperman, arctic adventurer and aspiring author. They began to take an interest in the social questions of the day, spurred by the muckraking reformist politics of the era and their friendship with radical journalist Lincoln Steffens. Bert was soon assigned to Paris as the correspondent of the Philadelphia Ledger.Vorse, A Footnote to Folly, pg. 29. It was in France that Mary, encouraged and instructed by her husband, began to try her own hand at professional writing.
For a time the Vorses settled in Venice. There she received what she later claimed was her baptism into the labor movement as a witness to the 1904 Italian general strike. In a procession of two thousand people, Mary Vorse made giddy by what she called the "peculiar, beautiful contagion" of mass solidarity, marched arm in arm with two girl workers down the Merceria to the Grand Canal.Garrison (1989) p. 32
The couple had two children: a boy, Heaton Vorse, born in 1901 and, after the couple moved to Provincetown in 1906, a girl, Mary Vorse Jr., born in 1907.1910 United States Federal Census On June 14, 1910, Bert died of a cerebral hemorrhage.Garrison (1989) p. 44.
In 1912, Vorse married the journalist Joe O'Brien, a socialist and fellow suffragist from Virginia. In 1914 the couple had a child, Joel. The following year, the boy's father died of stomach cancer, and Vorse was again a single mother.Garrison, Mary Heaton Vorse, p. 107
Activist and journalist 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.Vorse (1935) p. 21
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.Vorse (1935), p. 14It 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.
In the winter of 1913–1914, 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, it was at Vorse's apartment on East 11th Street, that Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Bill Hayward, Carlo Tresca, and others organized a defense committee.Garrison (1989), pp. 61-67
"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.Garrison (1989), pp. 68-69 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.Garrison (1989) pp. xiv, 75-76.
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", 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).
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."Garrison (1989), pp xiii-xiv
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 she 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 on the campaign to free American political prisoners incarcerated during the Red Scare. She also began, regularly, to produce articles on child labor, infant mortality, labor 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.Garrison (1989), pp. 161-162
In the January 1921 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.
Disillusion with the Soviet Union 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. 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 loyal partisan 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.Garrison (1989), pp. 171–172
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."Garrison (1989) p. 239