O'Hare, Kate Richards

O’HARE, KATE RICHARDS (1876–1948). One of the most popular socialist speakers during the so-called golden era of the Socialist Party of America prior to World War I, Kate Richards O’Hare traveled constantly on behalf of the party for almost two decades, held party posts, ran as a candidate for public offices, wrote for movement newspapers, and was a fixture at party conventions. During World War I, O’Hare was convicted under the Espionage Act for an anti-war speech and served time in the Missouri State Penitentiary.

Born in Ottawa County in central Kansas to homesteaders, Carrie Kathleen Richards and her family were forced off the land during the agricultural depression of the 1880s. They relocated to Kansas City, Missouri, and she soon completed her education and began to teach school. She abandoned teaching after only one term, and worked in the machine shop that her father operated, becoming one of the first women to join the International Order of Machinists. At this time, Richards was drawn to religion and to the temperance movement, as were many young women in the late nineteenth century. She considered becoming a missionary for the Disciples of Christ, but instead worked at the Florence Crittenton Mission, one of a chain of missions located in skid rows of major cities that tried to rehabilitate prostitutes and alcoholics. But Richards, already somewhat receptive to social criticisms of the existing economic order through her father’s influence, gradually decided that rescue work was no panacea for society’s ills. She attended a lecture by “Mother” Mary Harris Jones, met socialist publisher J. A. Wayland, and converted to socialism. Richards then enrolled in a school for socialist organizers in Girard, Kansas, where she married a fellow student, Francis Patrick O’Hare of Saint Louis, in 1902. The couple undertook an organizing tour for the party as their honeymoon, establishing a pattern for the O’Hares and their brood of four children according to which family life was shaped by the pace of party activities.

Kate O’Hare developed a following in the Socialist Party through her columns and features in the Appeal to Reason, Wilshire’s, the Socialist Woman, and other periodicals. Also gaining a reputation for her public speaking, she was especially in demand on the Socialist summer encampment circuit in the Plains states and the Southwest, where she addressed thousands annually. The O’Hares, after briefly trying homesteading in the territory of Oklahoma, settled in Kansas City, Kansas, in 1909. A year later, Kate O’Hare ran on the Socialist ticket for the U.S. House of Representatives. In 1911, the O’Hares settled permanently in Saint Louis when Kate and Frank joined the staff of the National Rip-Saw, an agrarian socialist monthly.

By then O’Hare was one of the acknowledged leaders of the Socialist Party. Already a member of the National Executive Committee and the Woman’s National Committee as well as the party’s representative to the International Socialist Bureau, she became the first woman to run for the U.S. Senate when the Missouri state branch of the party nominated her in 1916, the same year that she was a candidate to be the party’s vice presidential nominee. As a party leader, O’Hare’s views placed her within the dominant revisionist wing, even though she had an unearned reputation as a leftist. Her personal closeness to Eugene V. Debs led right-wing leaders Morris Hillquit and Victor L. Berger, who were contemptuous of her as a woman and a westerner, to consider her a left-winger. Nevertheless, O’Hare agreed with them on policy, believing that electoral politics, worker education, and reform measures would culminate in the inevitable transformation of the capitalist system into a socialist commonwealth. She developed a wide definition of the oppressed, as she tried to reach out not only to the urban proletariat but to other exploited groups of workers as well. She was a key figure in prodding the party to adopt an agricultural program, one which sidestepped the issue of collectivization. Almost alone among the leadership, O’Hare was sensitive to the exploitation of women workers in their various roles—as factory workers but also as housewives, farmers, and even prostitutes. While she did not define herself as a feminist, she cooperated with middle-class suffragists despite party policy but always argued that emancipation for women, as for men, could only be realized through socialism. She was one of the few party members to endorse, if cautiously, the legality of divorce, birth control, and abortion. At the same time, her specific goal for women in the forthcoming cooperative society was that they be free to follow what she considered their natural inclination, to be full-time wives and mothers.

During World War I, O’Hare was a tireless speaker and columnist against American intervention. She chaired the party committee that wrote an anti-war statement at an emergency convention in April 1917. Continuing to condemn the war despite curtailments of the right of free speech, O’Hare was indicted in North Dakota in July 1917 for an anti-war speech that she had delivered dozens of times. She was found guilty by an unsympathetic jury under the Espionage Act and sentenced to five years in prison by a judge who was an avowed foe of socialism. During her imprisonment, she sought to study prison conditions and to write case studies of her fellow inmates, but her notes were confiscated by prison authorities. Her stay, however, led her to expand her definition of the oppressed to include prisoners, and it changed the focus of her work to penal reform. O’Hare was released after fourteen months when President Woodrow Wilson commuted her sentence in May 1920. Thereafter, she worked for amnesty for Debs and other political prisoners, an end to prison contract labor, and worker education, founding Commonwealth College in Arkansas. She never renounced her commitment to social democracy, but the decline of the Socialist Party as well as her hostility to the Soviet Union ended the socialist phase of her life.

In 1928, she and Frank O’Hare were divorced, and she married Charles C. Cunningham, a businessman and engineer, and lived in California. Less active than earlier, she nevertheless held a position in Upton Sinclair’s End Poverty in California campaign, worked on the staff of Wisconsin Progressive congressional representative Thomas R. Amlie in 1937–1938, and was appointed to the staff of the director of the California Department of Penology, where she worked to improve living conditions at San Quentin Penitentiary. Still active addressing groups locally on civic issues, she died on 10 January 1948 in Benicia, California.

Basen, Neil K. “Kate Richards O’Hare: The ‘First Lady’ of American Socialism, 1901–1917.” Labor History 21 (spring 1980).

Foner, Philip S., and Sally M. Miller, eds. Kate Richards O’Hare: Selected Writings and Speeches. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1982.

Kennedy, Kathleen. "Casting An Evil Eye on the Youth of the Nation: Motherhood and Political Subversion in the Wartime Prosecution of Kate Richards O'Hare, 1917-1924," American Studies, vol. 39, no. 3 (Fall 1998), pp. 105–129

Miller, Sally M. From Prairie to Prison: The Life of Social Activist Kate Richards O’Hare. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1993.

Kate Richards O'Hare Letters.Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University.

Lubna A. Alam and Elizabeth I. Perry, "How Did Kate Richards O'Hare's Conviction and Incarceration for Sedition during World War I Change Her Activism?" Women and Social Movements in the United States, 1600-2000, womhist.alexanderstreet.com/—Document collection.