Vorse, Mary Heaton

VORSE, MARY HEATON (1874–1966). Feminist, foreign correspondent, and popular author of women’s fiction, Mary Heaton Vorse was also one of the nation’s leading labor journalists during the first half of this century. Vorse’s knowledgeable reports appeared in middle-class journals and major newspapers, as well as in leftist publications and in dispatches and broadsides distributed by the labor press. Unlike most labor reporters of her time, she emphasized the crucial contribution of women to labor advance. Her writing also helped to convince many Americans of the need for industrial labor organization.
Born into a well-off New England family, Vorse was determined to escape domesticity and to pursue a career. By 1910, she had won a national reputation as a writer of women’s popular fiction. As an editor of the Masses, a charter member of the Liberal Club and the Heterodoxy Club, and a founder of the Provincetown Players, Vorse was a key member of the group of intellectuals and radicals centered in pre–World War I Greenwich Village. Her experience in the suffrage movement and as a delegate to the women’s peace conference held at The Hague in 1915 determined her feminist vision. Twice widowed, Vorse functioned for most of her life as a single mother responsible for the support of her three children. Her desperate struggle to balance the demands of motherhood with those of her profession is a major theme of her life.

Vorse began her career as a labor reporter during the 1912 textile strike in Lawrence, Massachusetts. She continued publicity work with the Industrial Workers of the World in the 1914 New York City unemployed movement and at the 1916 mining strike on the Mesabi Range in Minnesota. After reporting the war in Europe, Vorse served as activist and publicist in the 1919 national steel strike and for the Amalgamated Clothing Workers during 1920. As publicity director of the 1926 Passaic, New Jersey, textile strike, she developed the revolutionary publicity tactics that set the pattern for the successful techniques that marked the labor uprisings of the next decade. Vorse was a firstcomer to the southern labor wars, at Gastonia, North Carolina, in 1929, and in “Bloody Harlan County,” Kentucky, in 1931, where she was expelled from the state by night riders. During the 1930s, Vorse reported the Congress of Industrial Organizations’ battles across the nation, Hitler’s rise to power, and the scenes of Stalin’s Soviet Union. She covered the lives of American factory workers during World War II and postwar reconstruction in Europe. Her last big story to win national attention was her 1952 exposé of crime in the waterfront unions.

Vorse became skeptical of the Communist promise while in Hungary in 1919, and in Moscow in 1921 and 1933. Disillusionment came much earlier to her than it did to many of her leftist or liberal friends, and her popularity fell victim to her premature cognizance. She also stumbled at the place where many liberals and democratic socialists turned right. She refused to publicly bait the Communist rank and file during the witch hunts of the fifties, and she denounced U.S. prosecution of the Cold War as a threat to human survival in the nuclear age.

Vorse spent fifty-four years in active battle for libertarian socialism, feminism, and world peace, a union of ideas far too radical for most of her peers to consider. At a time when the Communists knew her to be unreliable and unreasonable, the federal spy-hunters harassed her for more than forty years, maintaining surveillance of her activities until at least 1956, when she was eighty-two years old.

Garrison, Dee. Mary Heaton Vorse: The Life of an American Insurgent. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989.

Garrison, Dee, ed. Rebel Pen: The Writings of Mary Heaton Vorse. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1985.

Vorse, Mary Heaton. A Footnote to Folly. New York: Farrar and Rinehart, 1935.

Vorse, Mary Heaton. Papers. Archives of Labor History and Urban Affairs, Walter P. Reuther Library, Wayne State University, Detroit, Mich. http://reuther.wayne.edu/node/1161

Vorse, Mary Heaton, Selected Writings. Internet Archive. https://www.marxists.org/subject/women/authors/vorse/index.html