Le Sueur, Meridel

LE SUEUR, MERIDEL (1900–1996). A champion of women and the working class, Meridel Le Sueur was a prominent Midwest poet, journalist, short story writer, novelist, historian, and poet laureate of Saint Paul, Minnesota. Born in Murray, Iowa at the beginning of what she labeled the bloodiest century, Meridel LeSueur voiced the struggles of the poor and oppressed through her lyrical poetry, journalism, fiction and biographies.

Her parents, Marian and Arthur LeSueur, were Socialists, Minnesota Farmer Laborites, and organizers. They were founders and leaders with Eugene Debs in the People’s College in Fort Scott, Kansas. Marian was an organizer for the Non-Partisan League in North Dakota, an anti-cold war candidate for the US Senate, and an appointed Minnesota Commissioner of Education. Arthur was a poor people’s lawyer, mayor of Minot, North Dakota, and appointed to a judgeship by Farmer Labor Governor Benson. LeSueur’s parents’ activism and relationships with radical organizers such as Debs, Ella “Mother” Bloor, Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman (who she lived with in their commune in New York City) shaped her unique perspective and evocative imagery.

After dropping out of high school, LeSueur acted on the New York stage and in Hollywood, where she worked briefly as a stunt woman in silent films including “Perils of Pauline.” During World War I and the Palmer Raids, LeSueur witnessed attacks on her parents and on other radicals. She reported helping to remove tar and feathers from anti-war activists in a “clinic” in St. Paul, Minnesota. She was jailed in 1927 for protesting the executions of Sacco and Vanzetti.

After an early period of writing in the 1920s characterized by themes of women, birth, renewal, and hope in her stories “Persephone” and “Annunciation” (1935), LeSueur emerged as a major proletarian writer in the 1930s. She embraced a creative and political role as “voice, messenger, and awakener” of the oppressed, particularly women. She wrote and advocated for the recognition of a Midwest American culture. LeSueur wrote for the New Masses, later Masses & Mainstream and the Daily Worker, reporting on unemployment, breadlines, strikes, and the plight of farmers. LeSueur became a Communist Party organizer, taught in the Writers Project of the Works Progress Administration, and helped to establish flourishing literary networks through the John Reed clubs and the American Writers Congress. Supporting other writers, especially women, was important to her. She read the manuscripts sent to her from workers, farm women, minorities, gay people and helped and encouraged them. She used award money she received to publish others. In 1940 she published her best-known anthology of stories, Salute to Spring. At this time she also wrote The Girl (1978), a novel based on her life among destitute women during the Great Depression, The Crusaders (1955) a biography of her parents, and North Star Country (1945), a unique fusion of folklore and history about the Midwest.

With the advent of the Cold War and the McCarthy witch-hunts, LeSueur though a prominent literary figure was blacklisted from the publishing world. She remained creatively active “underground,” sustained during this dark time by her identification with the collective suffering of women. Knopf, the lone exception to her blacklisting, printed a series of children and young adult books about American figures. Abraham Lincoln, Nancy Hanks (Lincoln’s mother), Davy Crockett and Johnny Appleseed. These remain in print (Holy Cow! Press, Duluth Minnesota) and are beloved. An additional book in this series, “Zapata,” was not published, presumably because it supported armed struggle and was deemed too radical.

LeSueur stayed active, becoming a principal figure in the committee to save the Rosenbergs, and keeping the Minneapolis Communist Party Bookstore open, in spite of harassment. She was named a communist in testimony before the House Committee on Unamerican Activities, but refused the invitation to testify. She was not subpoenaed.

Her closeness to indigenous communities in Minnesota, New Mexico, and Mexico inspired several of her books, including Sparrow Hawk (1950), Corn Village (1970) , The Mound Builders (1974), The Conquistadors (1973) and Zapata (planned for 2021) She became enamored with corn as a crop that nourished indigenous communities and settlers.

Recognition returned for LeSueur with the resurgence of political activism and the rebirth of the feminist movement in the late 1960s. Many of her writings, long out of print, were reissued and hailed by younger generations who recognized a champion of the poor and of the “anonymous” woman. Her mentorship and lecturing of another generation of writers invigorated her. She wrote The Dread Road (1991), an assault on the senses and on the history of American capitalism’s outrageous cruelty using the story of an impoverished woman taking her dead infant on a bus trip to her burial. Among many new works in her nineties was Winter Prairie Woman (1990) and her deathbed poem “This with my last breath” (2012). This is her last reportage from inside, on her experience with her own fading life.

Her work derived optimism from her faith in the nurturing potential embodied in women, the working class and peoples’ movements for social change. She believed in the inevitability of victory over capitalism, a system she perceived as antagonistic to the biological and ecological continuum of the individual, nature, earth, and society.

Coiner, Constance. Better Red: The Writing and Resistance of Tillie Olsen and Meridel Le Sueur. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995.

Hampl, Patricia. “Meridel Le Sueur: Voice of the Prairie.” MS, August 1975.

Hedges, Elaine. Introduction to Ripening: Selected Work, 1927–1980, by Meridel Le Sueur. Old Westbury, N.Y.: Feminist Press, 1982.

Roberts, Nora R. Three Radical Women Writers: Class and Gender in Meridel Le Sueur, Tillie Olsen, and Josephine Herbst. New York: Garland Publishing, 1996.

Yount, Neala Janice Schleuning. “‘America—Song We Sang without Knowing’: Meridel Le Sueur’s America.” Ph.D. diss., University of Minnesota, 1978.

Meridel Le Sueur Papers. Collection Finding Aid. Minnesota Historical Society. http://www2.mnhs.org/library/findaids/00323.xml