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...