Dorothy Markey (born Dorothy Page Gary, 1897–1993), known by the pen name Myra Page, was a 20th-century American communist writer, journalist, union activist, and teacher.
Background Page was born Dorothy Page Gary on October 1, 1897, in Newport News, Virginia. Her father's ancestors, the Garys, came from Wales to the Tidewater region in 1720. Her mother's ancestors, the Barhams, came to Jamestown, Virginia. Her father Benjamin Roscoe Gary was a doctor, her mother Willie Alberta Barham an artist, and her home "affluent", "middle-class and progressive". Her brother Barham was a good friend of future Virginia Governor Colgate Darden.. Page's memoir refers to Colgate Darden by his nickname "Clukey".
In 1918, she received a Bachelor of Arts degree in English and History from Westhampton College (now the University of Richmond).
Career
After teaching school in Richmond, Virginia, Page started graduate work in 1919 at Columbia University. She studied anthropology under Franz Boas, Melvin Herskovitz, and Franklin Giddings.. Page says in her memoir that she learned some elements of Marxian theory from Franklin Giddings (such as the class struggle-based interpretation of history) but that he was not a Socialist or a thoroughgoing Marxist thinker. Both Boas and Herskovitz "challenged the prevailing theories about racial hierarchies." She took a class under John Dewey at Columbia's Teacher's College and attended courses given by theologians Harry Emerson Fosdick and Henry F. Ward at Union Theological Seminary. She later said of this period in her life, "it was like a whole world opening up." She also sat in on a short story writing course taught by Helen Hunter. In 1920, Page earned an MA degree; her thesis analyzed the effects of New York newspaper coverage on the Spanish–American War.
1920s
While still a graduate student, Page was active in the Young Women's Christian Association (YWCA), which at the time championed reform in race relations. Influenced by Social Gospel, she "developed an antiracist consciousness and chafed against the restrictions imposed upon her as a southern white woman." Upon completing her MA in 1920, she became a YWCA "industrial secretary" at a silk factory in Norfolk, Virginia, near her home town of Newport News. She organized education for women workers.
Giddings had introduced Page to the Rand School of Social Science, where she met Anna Louise Strong, Mary Heaton Vorse, and Scott Nearing. In 1921 she returned to New York from Norfolk, and studied further under Nearing at Rand. She was reading, for the first time, the Manifesto of the Communist Party by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.
Against her family's wishes, she took a factory job in Philadelphia and became a union organizer for the (then pro-communist) Amalgamated Clothing Workers Union (ACW). She chose Amalgamated for its progressivism and emphasis on education.: "I had studied enough to know that the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America was a progressive union with an educational program. I also knew how to sew, so I decided that was for me." She initially worked at a Wanamaker's department store. The union helped her get a job in a clothing sweatshop, where she participated in an ACW-led strike. She became a pants seamstress—good enough that the ACW sent her to New York City for training in making button holes. Next, she and others were sent to St. Louis, Missouri, to help unionize the city's biggest garment sweatshop, Curlee's. During a slump in 1923, she took a secretarial job and went home to Newport News for a few months. In the spring of 1924, she returned to the New York area and was hired as a schoolteacher of American history in Teaneck, New Jersey. There, "I joined the New York City Local of the American Federation of Teachers and quickly became one of its leaders.". In mentioning "the New York City Local" of AFT, Page is referring to AFT's radical Local 5 (also known as the New York City Teachers Union), of which she was a member.
In fall 1924, she got a teaching fellowship in the History Department of the University of Minnesota, chaired by F. Stuart Chapin. Pitirim Sorokin, former secretary to Alexander Kerensky and a Menshevik leader, was a professor there. She married fellow teacher John Markey, and together they joined the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) union. They both encouraged garment workers to unionize in the Twin Cities area (Minneapolis and St. Paul).
In June 1926, as a member of AFT, she attended a convention of the Trade Union Education League. Participants included William Z. Foster and John Jonstone. Also in June 1926, she took a class (Page and Nearing called it the Labor Research Study Group) under Nearing that sought a "law of social revolution" (though, according to Whittaker Chambers, "an infiltration of Communists... really ran the class, steered the discussions," and tried to "make the law of social revolution a Marxian law.") Nearing focused on the Soviet Union; Page wrote about India and the English Revolution of 1642. According to Whittaker Chambers (but not Page), their classmates included: Page, Chambers, Sam Krieger, Eve Dorf and her husband Ben Davidson, as well as Alfred J. Brooks, Dale Zysman, Benjamin Mandel, and Rachel Ragozin. In July–September, 1926, she attended first an International Teachers' Union conference in Vienna, Austria, several related teachers' union conferences in Paris, France, and then, with Nearing, a British trade union Conference in the UK. After passing through New York City, in part to publish her book with Nearing, The Law of Social Revolution, via the Federated Press, she returned to Minneapolis by late September to reunite with her husband. They immediately set about a "central trade union committee" of the Minnesota AFL and commenced "workers' education" in Duluth.
In June 1928, Page earned her PhD in sociology with double minor in Economics and Psychology from the University of Minnesota. In the fall of 1928, she accepted a teaching position at Wheaton College (Massachusetts), while her husband had started a teaching job a year earlier at Connecticut College. In 1926, the YWCA had helped fund her research into working conditions among garment workers in Greenville and Gastonia, North Carolina, and in 1929 again funded her to rewrite her doctoral thesis as Southern Cotton Mills and Labor (1929): "Many lines and quotes... appear later in my Gastonia novel, Gathering Storm."
On March 30, 1929, the Loray Mill strike (also known as the "Gastonia Strike") broke out and lasted into August; Sophie Melvin (future wife of Simon Gerson) traveled there to join Fred Beal in organizing strikers on behalf of the Communist Party controlled National Textile Workers Union. In fall 1929, her husband joined Wheaton College as head of her Sociology Department. In October 1929, Page was one of scores of founding members of the John Reed Clubs. Her "group" included: Grace Lumpkin, Katharine DuPre Lumpkin, Dorothy Douglas, Ben Appel, Sophie Appel (and probably Agnes Smedley who also knew most of these people). During the Wall Street Crash of 1929 that started October 28–29, 1929, Page had just started working as a journalist for Labor Age, the ILD's Labor Defender, and Southern Woman magazines. Some time in 1929, Page along with Lumpkin, Olive Dargin and three others began writing novels about the Gastonia Strike: Page's was called Gathering Storm: A Story of the Black Belt, published in 1932.
1930s
At the end of the 1929–1930 academic year, Page and her husband left Wheaton College. During the ensuing decade, she worked as a political journalist and writer. She wrote for Southern Workman, Working Woman, and the CPUSA newspaper The Daily Worker. In 1931, she became editor for the New Pioneer monthly magazine for Communist children (1931–1938), published by Young Communist League USA. She recruited her brother Barham and sister Bert to contribute stories. In May 1931 she traveled with William Z. Foster to hear him advocate that the National Miners' Union should go on strike while breaking away from the AFL. Page quarreled with Foster over his position, but she did include a piece about the strike in the July 1931 New Pioneer issue.
Page's husband John Markey joined the Labor Research Association (LRA), for which he contributed writings under the pseudonym "John Barnett". LRA's directors included Anna Rochester, Bill Dunne, Grace Hutchins, Carl Haessler, and Charlotte Todes Stern. Edward Dahlberg was another contributor. Page notes in her memoir that Markey "helped organize automotive and transportation workers. It was good experience and the workers liked him...but organizing was not his forté. He was always best at academic teaching and research." As "John Barnett", Markey also contributed articles to The Communist, 1933–1935.
Page spent two years in Moscow, whence she wrote for American socialist journals as well as for the Soviet communist publication Moscow News. She also gathered material for her novel Moscow Yankee (1935) while living there.
Upon their return to the States around November 1933, when the US recognized the USSR diplomatically, Page and her husband lived in Brooklyn, NY. She joined the editorial board of Soviet Russia Today, a Soviet-backed magazine edited by Jessica Smith, wife of Harold Ware.
On May 1, 1935, Page joined the League of American Writers (1935–1943), whose members included Alexander Trachtenberg of International Publishers, Frank Folsom, Louis Untermeyer, Bromfelds, I. F. Stone, Millen Brand, Arthur Miller, Lillian Hellman, and Dashiell Hammett. Members were largely either Communist Party members or fellow travelers. Aline Bernstein (mistress of Thomas Wolfe) often hosted them at her home.
Starting in August 1935, Page's husband spent a year (again as "John Barnett") as dean of Commonwealth College, a workers' school in Mena, Arkansas, while Page taught English writing and literature. Page met FLOTUS Eleanor Roosevelt when she came to visit the college.
In March 1937, she interviewed Andre Malraux for his views on the Spanish Civil War and Hallie Flanagan about the Federal Theatre Project.
During the 1930s, Page also taught school at the Writer's School, underwritten by the League of American Writers (itself established by the Party) and based in New York City. In 1937, husband John Markey got a job as educational director of the Transportation Workers Union (TWU), a CIO member headed by Mike Quill. In the summers of 1938 and 1939, Page taught at the Highlander Folk School in Grundy County, Tennessee.
Later life In the 1940s, she continued to teach at the Writer's School.
In the 1950s and 1960s, she wrote biographies for juveniles under her married name "Dorothy Markey."
Communism
Party membership
In her memoir In a Generous Spirit, Page states that both she and her husband were members of the nascent Communist Party of the USA. She does not state when, but from her description it seems they joined in 1928 during the height of factionalism within the Party between followers of Jay Lovestone, James P. Cannon, and William Z. Foster (described at some length in the memoir of Whittaker Chambers). Page states that she and her husband supported Foster because "he was a union man."
By the fall of 1930, after they had let their contracts to teach expire at Wheaton College, her husband "John and I began to work full-time for the movement," i.e., for the Party. In 1931, she became editor for the New Pioneer monthly magazine for Communist children (1931–1938), published by Young Communist League USA.
Moscow