Harold or "Hal" Ware (August 19, 1889 – August 14, 1935) was an American Marxist, regarded as one of the Communist Party's top experts on agriculture. He was employed by a federal New Deal agency in the 1930s. He is alleged to have been a Soviet spy and is understood to have founded the "Ware Group," a covert group of operatives within the United States government aiding Soviet intelligence agents.
Background
Harold Maskell Ware, best known by his nickname "Hal," was born on August 19, 1889, in Woodstown, New Jersey, the fourth child of Ella Reeve Bloor and her husband, Lucien Bonaparte Ware. Two of Ware's three older siblings died in early childhood.
His mother, Ella Bloor, converted to socialism during 1894-1895, when the family lived in Philadelphia. She became a lifelong activist in the labor movement, an early member of the Social Democracy of America (organized by Victor L. Berger and Eugene V. Debs), and a founder of the Communist Party of America. Ware was raised in a politically radical household, as a "Red Diaper Baby."
When he was 15, a case of measles left Ware with what doctors believed to be an early case of tuberculosis. His divorced mother moved with him and two brothers to the country for a year, while the rest of the family lived with his father in Philadelphia and attended school there. While his mother went weekly to Wilmington to speak and organize literature sales (as Delaware state organizer for the Socialist Party), Ware lived a rural life. Although he would return to school in the big city the following year, his orientation towards the countryside was firmly established.
Following his graduation from high school (circa 1907), Ware enrolled in a two-year course in agriculture at Pennsylvania State College, later Penn State University.Margaret S. Ware Death Certificate, Wilmington, New Castle Co., Delaware; Date of death: October 16, 1916.
Career
Following graduation, with financial help from his father he bought a grain and dairy farm near Arden, a small town near Philadelphia, where he learned farming firsthand. His brief experience as a working farmer made him almost a unique figure among pioneer members of the American Communist Party, a group almost exclusively composed of urban laborers, factory workers, or intellectuals (and mostly foreign-born).
Before WWI began, Ware had proven himself something of an agricultural innovator. Unable to afford equipment for his tractor, he welded together two harrows for horses. He adapted other horse-drawn gear for use in mechanized agriculture.
After three years, Ware sold the farm and took a job in a shipyard as a draftsman, for which he had a natural faculty. This lasted until the end of the First World War, whose armistice in November 1918 ended the torrent of government funding directed toward the shipbuilding industry.
Communist Party
Although not a delegate to its founding convention, Ware was a member of the Communist Labor Party of America (CLP) from the year of its origin, 1919, as were his mother and older sister, Helen.For a list of delegates to the founding convention of the CLP see http://www.marxisthistory.org/subject/usa/eam/cpa-clp19delegates.html Ware and his family stayed with the CLP throughout its permutations, merging into the United Communist Party in 1920, into the Communist Party of America in 1921, and into the "aboveground" Workers Party of America in 1922, and eventually the Communist Party of the USA in 1929.For the complete saga of the early Communist Party's evolution, see Early American Marxism website, http://www.marxisthistory.org/subject/usa/eam/communistparty.html
Almost immediately after the Party launched, federal and state authorities moved against the fledgling communist movement, forcing its adherents to make use of pseudonyms and to conduct their activities in secret. During the so-called "underground period" of the party, the agriculturally-oriented Ware used the pseudonym "H.R. Harrow," publishing under that by-line in the communist press.The best available list of pseudonyms of American communists appears in Jeffrey B. Perry, "Pseudonyms: A Reference Aid for Studying American Communist History," American Communist History, vol. 3, no. 1 (June 2004), pp. 55-126. The identification of Hal Ware as "H.R. Harrow" was made shortly after publication of the article, vetted to the H-net Historians of American Communism newsgroup, H-HOAC. (The pseudonym seems to have been a pun on his real given name, "Harold.")
In 1921, eager to study the plight of migrant farm workers firsthand with a view to organizing them for the Communist Party, Ware took a six-month trip around the United States, working harvests from the South to the Midwest, Northwest and then East again through the Upper Midwest. This experience, combined with his previous agricultural experience, cemented Ware's place as the Communist Party's leading agricultural expert.
That fall, in addition to articles he wrote for the "underground" and "aboveground" Communist press, Ware compiled an exhaustive survey of American agriculture, including maps showing distribution of types of farms, farm incomes, and so forth in different sections of the country. The research was transmitted to the Communist International in Moscow, where it was read and praised by Lenin himself.
In late 1921, Ware attended the founding convention in New York of the Workers Party of America. He was elected an alternate to the governing Central Executive Committee of that organization.Theodore Draper, The Roots of American Communism. New York: Viking, 1957. Page 450, footnote 28. Ware was not typically a member of the Communist Party's top committees; he preferred to work in the agricultural sector rather than to engage in factional party politics.
Soviet collective farming
Ware helped come up with the idea of using funds raised by the Friends of Soviet Russia organization to construct a model collective farm in Soviet Russia. His farm would serve as a model to help to alleviate the great Russian famine through production of grain plus firsthand demonstration of modern agricultural technique. An appropriation of $75,000 was granted for the project, with Ware's half-brother, Carl Reeve, traveling around the U.S., showing a motion picture depicting horrific conditions in Russia to help raise funds. Funding in hand, Ware went to the J.I. Case Farm Implement Co. and brokered a deal for 24 tractors and related equipment.
In May 1922, Hal and Cris Ware left his three children in America for Soviet Russia along with their tractors, implements, a complete medical unit, and several tons of food supplies. Also making the voyage was a doctor who spoke Russian and a group of American farmers to operate the machinery. The group had been assigned land in the village of Toikino in Perm guberniia, a substantial distance from any centers of population. They taught local peasants the basics of machine operation and plowed of land. Shortages of fuel, hauled by peasant wagons some from the nearest train station, severely hampered their efforts. At season's end, the American crew left for Moscow, whence they went home to America with thanks.
The next year, Soviet authorities were eager to expand the Toikino experiment of 1922. The Soviet People's Commissariat of Agriculture offered a large tract of fertile land in the Kuban region, just north of the Black Sea for a second model farm. Working again with the Friends of Soviet Russia organization, Ware organized a party of 40 to make the trip, including agricultural specialists, a doctor, and a nurse. He arrived in Soviet Russia to inspect the land designated for the project, only to be told by Soviet officials that the deal was off because local peasants had begun to allocate the land among themselves. A hasty search commenced for yet another site, in the North Caucasus, but the project was delayed.
Ware spent most of 1925 raising funds for his Soviet farming venture. This farm was organized as a Russian-American joint venture, with Ware as its American Director and then director of the state farm for three years. The project took over four flour mills and profitably operated them; they began to electrify the countryside.
During winter 1928-29, Ware returned to the United States, where he attempted to interest American agricultural equipment manufacturers in the Soviet market. He convinced some companies to send test tractors and implements along with mechanics to assemble them. He stayed in the Soviet through the collectivization campaign of 1929-30.
Return to America
In Spring 1931, Ware set out to organizing farmers and farm-workers in America. In the company of Lem Harris, another Communist Party agricultural expert, he made a year-long survey of American agriculture, echoing his research of 1921. The pair travelled by car around the United States, visiting nearly every state in the union, studying the sometimes desperate conditions which resulted from the collapse of agricultural prices associated with the Great Depression.
Shortly after completion of this task, Ware established a research center in Washington, DC called Farm Research, Inc. and recruited personnel to run it. The institute, funded by the Communist Party, published a newspaper called The Farmers National Weekly continuously throughout the Great Depression. Fellow Communist Party member Herbert Joseph Putz (Erik Bert) (1904-1981) edited the newspaper (1934-1936) ("Farm Research" received funding from the Robert Marshall Foundation, which also funded the Communist controlled news agency "Federated Press.") In 1932, Ware was active in the Farmers Holiday Association on behalf of the Communist Party.
Soviet espionage: Ware Group
Allegations: Whittaker Chambers
In his 1952 memoir, Witness, former Communist Whittaker Chambers wrote that from the time of Ware's death to his defection from the Communist Party in April 1938, he had been a member of the "Washington spy apparatus" headed by Colonel Boris Bykov, a Russian military intelligence officer. Chambers wrote that in addition to the four members of the group (also identified by Lee Pressman under oath to Congress in 1950, though Pressman denied that the group engaged in espionage):
There must have been sixty or seventy others, though Pressman did not necessarily know them all; neither did I. All were dues-paying members of the Communist Party. Nearly all were employed in the United States Government, some in rather high positions, notably in the Department of Agriculture, the Department of Justice, the Department of the Interior, the National Labor Relations Board, the Agricultural Adjustment Administration, the Railroad Retirement Board, the National Research Project — and others.
Chambers further wrote that "by 1938, the Soviet espionage apparatus in Washington had penetrated the US State Department, the US Treasury Department, the Bureau of Standards and the Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland. These individuals "supplied the Soviet espionage apparatus with secret or confidential information, usually in the form of official United States Government documents for microfilming," Chambers stated.
In the 1930s, Hal Ware was employed by the federal government, working for the Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA), a New Deal agency which reported to the Secretary of Agriculture but was independent of the Department of Agriculture bureaucracy. According to Chambers, he also "organized that Washington underground" in which he was later to work. Introduced to him in the spring of 1934, Chambers described Ware at length:
<blockquote>He was as American as ham and eggs and as indistinguishable as everybody else. He stood about five feet nine, a trim, middle-aging man in 1934, with a plain face, masked by a quiet earnestness of expression wholly reassuring to people whom quickness of mind makes uncomfortable. Nevertheless, his mind was extremely quick. ...