Lowe, Caroline A.

LOWE, CAROLINE A. (1874–1933). A member of the Socialist Party from 1903, Caroline A. Lowe was a well-respected regional organizer in Kansas and Oklahoma. Born near Cottom, Essex County, Ontario, Canada, she moved at age five with her parents to Kansas City, Kansas, where she attended public schools. At age seventeen, she became a teacher and helped organize a local teachers’ association. In 1908, she quit her profession to become a national lecturer for the Socialist Party. Lowe toured the Oklahoma socialist encampments during the summers of 1909 and 1912, sharing the speaking platform with labor movement luminaries such as Mother Mary Jones and Eugene V. Debs. She served from 1910 to 1912 as secretary of the Women’s National Committee and managed its offices in the party’s national headquarters in Chicago. In 1914 Lowe ran for the Kansas state legislature on the Socialist Party ticket and helped launch the People’s College of Fort Scott, Kansas.

In 1914 Lowe enrolled in law school; she was admitted to the Kansas bar in 1916. As early as 1914, she joined the free-speech fights and was arrested in Kansas City. During World War I, she defended members of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) in well-publicized trials in Chicago; Wichita, Kansas; and Everett, Washington. Lowe became IWW counsel in the defense of fifty-four deportees brought to Ellis Island in early 1919 from Seattle, Washington, aboard the infamous “Red Special.” With the assistance of Charles Recht, chief counsel for the New York Bureau of Legal Advice, she secured the unconditional release of almost all of the defendants, a major civil liberties achievement in the context of the Red Scare.

In 1923, she joined a law firm in Pittsburg, Kansas, and was appointed the official counsel for the United Mine Workers’ District 14, aiding miners in workers’ compensation cases. She retired from practice about one year before her death.

Buhle, Mari Jo. Women and American Socialism, 1870–1920. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1981.

Early, Frances H. A World Without War: How U.S. Feminists and Pacifists Resisted World War I. Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1997.

Lowe, Caroline A. Papers. Kansas Collection, Haldeman-Julius Room, Pittsburg State University, Pittsburg, Kans.

Sellars, Nigel Anthony. Oil, Wheat & Wobblies: The Industrial Workers of the World in Oklahoma, 1905-1930. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998.