National Affairs: Old-Fashioned Radical

By the time she was taken to a convalescent home at Richlandtown, Pa. last month, tiny, 89-year-old Mrs. Ella Reeve Ware Cohen Omholt—known for half a century in hobo jungles and union halls as "Mother Bloor"*—had served the Communist Party with a generosity which few U.S. leftists had equaled. Hot-tongued, warmhearted, indomitable Mother Bloor was a rarity in the party's ranks—a genuine, old-fashioned American radical, whose roots ran deep into the U.S. past.

She had been a suffragette, a temperance worker, a Socialist, a fiery fighter in lost causes in the half-forgotten day of pale little mine breaker-boys and vicious sweatshops. She had been arrested 36 times, from coast to coast. She had been an intimate of Eugene Debs, had helped Upton Sinclair investigate the horrors of Chicago's stockyards, which he dramatized in his novel, The Jungle. She saw the Pennsylvania anthracite strike of 1902, the great Michigan copper strike of 1913.

She was born on Staten Island in 1862—the rebellious daughter of a staid Republican—was descended from revolutionary soldiers and related to Reconstructionist Thaddeus Stevens. She had met Walt Whitman, Henry Ward Beecher and Robert Ingersoll. Thrice married, she was the mother of six children, wrote children's books. She was 57 when she joined the Communist Party in 1919, certain that it could be an instrument for good in the U.S.

She ran for public office as a Communist candidate, became a perennial rally speaker and wrote articles for Manhattan's Daily Worker. Her birthday became an annual excuse for big Communist picnics and celebrations. But early this spring, after a bad fall, she began to fail. As she lay in her hospital room in a half-coma she repeated, over & over: "There is no country like America, the good old U.S.A." At times, she sang the Star-Spangled Banner—all four verses.

She died last week. The party arranged to have her body lie in state in New York's St. Nicholas Arena—a drafty hall often used for prizefights—and invited the public to her funeral.

Among her gifts to the party were two sons. One, Harold Ware, spent ten years in Russia, was complimented by Lenin himself for helping to develop mechanized farming in the Soviet Union. Ware organized the Communist espionage unit in Washington to which Whittaker Chambers was assigned. In 1935, Ware was killed in an automobile crash. The second son, Carl Reeve, 50, has been a paid party functionary most of his adult life, goes about party work with a fish-eyed frigidity, reflects the party's shift from wrong-headed but warm radicalism to institutionalized conspiracy.