Ella
Reeve Bloor was born on Staten Island, on 8th July, 1862. Bloor grew
up in New Jersey and after marrying Lucian Ware when she was nineteen,
she was a mother of four by 1892.
Bloor became involved in several reform movements including the Women's
Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) and women's
suffrage and wrote two books, Three Little
Lovers of Nature (1895) and Talks
About Authors and Their Work (1899).
In
1897 she joined with Eugene Debs and Victor
Berger to form the Social Democratic
Party (SDP). The following year she moved to the more radical
Socialist Labor Party that was led
by Daniel De Leon. However, in 1902 she
became a member of the Socialist Party
of America (SPA).
Bloor worked as a trade union organizer and helped during industrial
disputes in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Colorado, Ohio and New York. In
1905 she helped a fellow member of the Socialist
Party of America, the author, Upton Sinclair,
to gather information on the Chicago
stockyards. This material eventually appeared in Sinclair's best-selling
book, The Jungle.
A leading figure in the Socialist Party
of America, she ran several times unsuccessfully for political
office, including secretary of state for Connecticut and lieutenant
governor of New York.
Bloor, a member of the left-wing faction of the Socialist
Party of America, was expelled from the party in 1919. Bloor joined
with others ousted from the SPA to form the
American Communist Party. In 1921 and 1922 attended the Second
International conventions in Moscow and was a member of the party's
central committee (1932-48).
After
the German Army invaded the Soviet
Union in June 1941, Bloor became an advocate of American participation
in the Second World War. Later she argued for
an early invasion of Europe to create a Second
Front.
Ella Reeve Bloor, whose autobiography, We
Are Many, was published in 1940, died in Richlandtown on
10th August, 1951.
(1)
Agnes
Smedley,
letter to Florence Lennon (23rd October
1921)
In Moscow, amid great poverty, Ella Reeve Bloor wore lace dresses
over silk coloured slips; also long strings of coloured beads, rings,
etc. And she lived with an idiot. Earl Browder, a young, dainty man
of some 25 or 26 who bought (and wore) baby-blue silk Russian smocks
in the market; and long black silk ribbons which he wore as belts.
And then he, with his baby white skin and fair toothbrush moustache,
posed in Moscow as the delegate from the Kansas miners. So help me
gawd!! It was awful! I was so disgusted I couldn't even protest. I
hate female men above all. And then to have them say they represent
miners when I know they haven't been within a thousand miles of a
mine. And Mother Bloor posed as the representative of five or six
organizations, from the far West to Massachusetts!
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