O'HARE AS ANTI-WAR ACTIVIST AND POLITICAL PRISONER
For almost fifteen years, O'Hare had built a national reputation as a loyal and orthodox SP member who insistently raised women's issues while usually privileging class analysis. The outbreak of World War I initially re-enforced that image: O'Hare opposed the war as a capitalist and imperialist bloodbath, but also asserted women's distinctive interest in peace. She utilized arguments concerning female virtue and motherhood, and of the sanctity of the traditional family and marriage, as key arguments against the war. In her usual style, she used traditional values as battering rams against existing privilege, even while she at times challenged those traditional values themselves. However, her important role in formulating the SP's anti-intervention policy, followed by her subsequent status as the only nationally known SP women incarcerated under the Espionage Act, ensured that she would become known more as an anti-war activist (and, later, a prison reformer) than for her distinctively modulated feminism.
After World War I erupted in Europe, O'Hare vehemently denounced Wilson's policy of allowing trade with belligerent nations. When Wilson endorsed a massive increase in armaments spending under the guise of "preparedness" and moved towards war, O'Hare bitterly criticized those policies. O'Hare's analysis blended her usual three themes: a Marxist critique of capitalism; an assertion that women's distinctive voice would help resolve mankind's problems; and a complaint that capitalism and the wars it bred disrupted traditional family values.
During the early years of the war, O'Hare had denounced rising unemployment in the U.S. caused by the disruption of international trade, and the U.S. provision of belligerent armies. In the United States, she charged, children froze for lack of coal and blankets, while miners and textile workers starved for lack of work. Although Europe could not produce the materials necessary for war, "war still rages, simply because the United States furnishes the food, clothing, horses, automobiles and ammunition that enable the warring nations to continue the killing." Such exports imposed scarcities upon the American people. Illegitimate European war babies were provided with food and medical care so that the belligerent nations would have cannon fodder for future wars; but in the pious land of Woodrow Wilson "the children of decently married mothers are born DEAD, STARVED in their mother's womb while we send shiploads of food to Europe to feed the war!" O'Hare exclaimed that "unfortunately for the babies, they do not all die--God knows they would be better off dead, but many of them creep feebly into life, drag through a hungry, sickly youth to become the mothers of children more unfit than themselves, or hidebound, brain-stunted voters of the Democratic ticket." The United States, she pointed out, did not even hypocritically claim idealistic motives, but sold to whichever nation could pay; "the bloodstained gold of any nation looks good to us."[1]
O'Hare's stance contained a superficial contradiction: she denounced unemployment amidst plenty, but also attacked the U.S. trade with belligerent nations which somewhat alleviated that unemployment. However, O'Hare recognized that this contradiction was implicit only in capitalism: socialized production for use rather than profit would feed and cloth the American people without fueling the war in Europe. She demanded that the U.S. government "mobilize an army of peace" from the unemployed, who would gather, transport and distribute the food rotting for lack of a market. The government must save lives instead of destroying them. "Many times in the past this government has mobilized armies and sent them out to kill and maim, lay waste and destroy, why should not our government become a force for conservation of human life as well as for destruction?" The government should commander the railroads as it had during the Civil War: "If the government has the right to use a railroad to transport the means of death, why not the right to transport the means of life?" Similarly, it should seize idle cotton mills and cloth the people. "The fields of Dixie are white with cotton, the cotton mills of Dixie stand silent and idle and untold millions shiver and freeze for want of clothing. If the private owners of the cotton mills will not weave cloth, why should not the United States Government take possession of every cotton mill for six months, put the idle weavers to work, buy the farmers' cotton at a fair price and produce for the naked at the labor cost of production." The government could impose a peace tax instead of a war tax, or finance this "war on poverty and unemployment" with the greenbacks with which it had financed past wars.[2] O'Hare, of course recognized why no such program was possible: capitalism required production for profit, regardless of human needs.
As the U.S. moved towards war after the sinking of the Lusitania, O'Hare bitterly asserted that Europe was so devastated that it no longer offered profitable opportunities for capitalists. It was "a land now fit only for vultures and scavengers." However,
Here in the United States there are billions of dollars waiting for profitable investment, three million jobless men just ripe for cannon meat. We have endless food supplies for profitable manipulation by speculators and a world of raw material for making arms and ammunition and, most important of all, a completely cowed, stupid, unorganized working class waiting like patient sheep to be led to the slaughter. It is unthinkable that the great captains of finance will overlook this golden opportunity to ravish America as they have ravished Europe and our dance with the Red Hell is just about due.[3]
O'Hare lamented that "the hysterical frothings of loud jingoes and the rabid howlings of the harlot press" had prepared the way for war. Why all the outrage over the sinking of one ship when war had already killed millions? "If machines of slaughter are not to be used to kill human beings why expend millions of dollars making them?" O'Hare thundered that "these same capitalist interests murder in times of peace here in the United States every year in our industries and slums a hundred times a thousand human beings and you never turn a hair.... Rockefeller, Morgan and Long" massacred strikers in Colorado, West Virginia, Michigan, and throughout Dixie. "These American citizens were murdered more brutally and with far more cold blooded cruelty" and premeditation than the Lusitania victims, yet Wilson had expressed no concern. Wilson himself was guilty of the mass murder of Mexican men, women, and children. "But why continue? Great God! The story of innocent men, women and children murdered by the insane greed of the capitalist interests that would open the gates of hell and toss us into the pit, is so long, so brutal, so cursed that I cannot bring myself to write of it..... To me a human life is a human life, one as sacred as another, and the taking of a human life is murder whether done on the battlefield, on the high seas or in a labor strike." O'Hare advocated trying Rockefeller for the Ludlow massacre, Wilson for his mass murders in Mexico, and the industrial masters generally for "the murder of the hundreds of thousands of the victims of industry." Only then, she said, could the United States justly condemn the Kaiser. "If only the workers would have listened to the voice of reason and intelligence instead of ever harking back to prejudice and ignorance.... But I fear that [it] is now too late.... Humanity MUST pay for [the] wilful, wanton blindness of mankind."[4]
In April 1917, as Wilson prepared the U.S. for war, O'Hare denounced those Socialists, Christians, and union members who claimed that they were Americans first, those other self-identities second. In a statement that would soon cause her much trouble, O'Hare declared that
These human parrots overlook the fact that the very cornerstone of the Socialist movement is the international brotherhood of labor; that the basis of organized labor is the international welfare of the workers; and that the fundamental creed of the church is the brotherhood of all God's children. If God draws no national lines; if Socialism is international and organized labor knows no boundaries, how in the name of reason can a Christian, a Socialist or a labor unionist declare that nationalism is "first" and all other things "second"?
.... I am a Socialist, a labor unionist and a follower of the Prince of Peace, FIRST; and an American, second. I will serve my class, before I will serve the country that is owned by my industrial masters. If need be, I will give my life and the life of my mate, to serve my class. BUT NEVER WITH MY CONSENT WILL THEY BE GIVEN TO ADD TO THE PROFITS AND PROTECT THE STOLEN WEALTH OF THE BANKERS AND FOOD SPECULATORS AND AMMUNITION MAKERS.
I am not pro-English; not pro-German; not pro-American, I A PRO-WORKING CLASS.... The world is my country, the workers are my countrymen, peace and social justice are my creeds, and to these and these alone I owe loyalty and allegiance.[5]
Europe exemplified the consequence of putting nation before class. "When the master class sounded the trumpet of war," Socialists abandoned their principles and became nationalists first; that is why "Europe is one vast charnel house."[6]
O'Hare also asserted that women could distinctively further the struggle for peace. Women, she said, nurtured and delivered life, and therefore respected it more than property. They were also among the most victimized by war, "the wounded who do not fight, the death stricken who may not die," who suffer "all of the seething hell of war and none of its lure and passion." They lost their sons, husbands, and lovers, and worked themselves to death paying for the wars long after they had ended. War also put "a premium on bastardy, the loosing of man's most evil passions, outrage, rape and illegitimate motherhood." O'Hare said that THE MANIFESTO OF THE UNITED WOMANHOOD OF THE UNITED STATES IS THAT PEACE SHALL BE THE PRICE THAT KINGS AND EMPERORS SHALL PAY FOR OUR FOOD AND CLOTHING, AND THAT NO SONS OF OURS SHALL DAMN THEIR SOULS MAKING MUNITIONS OF WAR."[7] She declared that
The great common mass of men are so bound up in the political, financial and industrial meshes of the capitalist class that they are tangled like flies in a spider's web and cannot, or will not, make an adequate protest against the hellish crime of plunging our nation into war. ONLY THE WOMANHOOD OF AMERICA CAN DO IT AND ONLY TIME WILL TELL WHETHER WE ARE BIG ENOUGH TO MEET THE DEMANDS LAID UPON US..... Even the miserable street cur will fight to the last breath for her mongrel babies--shall American women be less loyal to her children?[8]
O'Hare pointed out that war-induced unemployment destroyed homes and families. Unemployed men, she said, "have crept into jails, workhouses and municipal lodginghouses like animals to their burrows and whined like famished dogs in breadlines and before soup kitchens." Similarly, "hundreds of thousands of girls have lost their six-dollar-a-week jobs and have been driven out on the streets to be used by lustful men and made the victims of police brutality." O'Hare thundered that "homes have been broken up, babies deserted by desperate parents on doorsteps and orphan asylums flooded by the children of the jobless men haunting the breadlines."[9]
O'Hare bitterly denounced the cynicism with which European governments, clergy, and intellectuals had abandoned their insistence on female chastity and the sanctity of the marriage tie, instead demanding that "men must die and women breed for our glory."[10] O'Hare quoted many leaders as praising women who gave themselves to soldiers, in or out of marriage, before the latter joined the slaughter. These leaders insisted that such mothers and their illegitimate children must not be ostracized as formerly because their babies were needed to replenish the supply of cannon fodder. O'Hare quoted preachers and other leaders who had claimed that socialism would undermine marriage, the family, and sexual morality; yet capitalism, she charged, had caused all the horrors its proponents claimed to fear.
Socialism has not come to pass, but capitalism has reached its full fruition and in one short year we have seen every charge ever made against us realized as a hellish living fact, and every crime we have been charged with fostering has been committed against the human race.... The holy instinct to mate has been shorn of every pure and holy aspect and cast into the face of the world as a brutal necessity to produce human lives to glut the sateless lust of the war demons.
In that short year we have also seen the fat paunched clergy, the prostituted press, the "kept" intellectuals and the pious goody-goodies right-about-face and accept as right and just and pious all the hellish crimes they charged the Socialists with fostering.[11]
The new doctrine of "war babies" had "replaced Christian morality and the sacredness of the marriage tie."[12]
In 1915 Kate and her husband Frank published a widely-performed morality play, "World Peace," which encapsulated Kate's view of war as caused both by capitalism and by masculine values. The world's rulers--Kaiser, King, Czar, and Emperor--are depicted as blood relatives who wish for peace, but also as mere figureheads controlled by capitalists demanding war. Armament manufacturers stressed that "the only way to enforce peace is to be well prepared for war." The figurehead rulers fear working-class revolt in the event of war, but are reassured by the war-mad politicians that "we have the support of press and pulpit and when the day of action comes you will find that well-garnished words of patriotism will sway the masses." And indeed the workers initially resist war, only flocking to the colors when convinced that their brother workers have betrayed them and "we must kill or be killed." The clergy supports the war as holy, and tells its sheep that "God and your king command that ye breed before ye die."[13]
Meanwhile, a realpolitik America debates with a Columbia who symbolized women united for peace.
America: This war is but the outcome of civilized industrial life. It is distressing, it is true, but you should not allow sentiment to overshadow your practical common sense. Just think what a wonderful opportunity for business. [Columbia shudders and hides her eyes from the appalling scene.]
Columbia: How terrible to think of business, when millions of human lives are lost, culture and art trampled into the dust, and civilization dragged back into savagery.
America: Quite true, but it is business that rules the world today, and not sentiment.... A stream of wealth is pouring from our shores to the warring nations and a stream of good European gold will come back to us.
Columbia: But the gold is all stained with human blood, and our own working people are starving for the food we send to feed this war.
America: Mere Socialistic cant!.... The war [is] good for business.[14]
Women from every European power plead that America mediate a peace and cease supplying the warring nations with the necessities of war. "Every bullet may make a widow, every shrapnel a dozen orphans, and the dum-dum kills not alone the body of the man on the firing line but the heart and soul of the woman left behind." The United States responds by holding a day of prayer and demanding that women "go home to your children" and leave war and diplomacy to men.[15]
The women of Europe send a Messenger asking again for American mediation and an embargo on war supplies. American capitalists oppose these demands and bid that women content themselves with charity and war relief; but the women's Messenger replies that humanitarian relief only prolonged the war. Columbia tells the messenger that "In the travail of giving life to sons we have been initiated into the holy sisterhood of mothers," a sisterhood proof against bigotry, nationalism, and hate. Womanhood must declare that if they provide the cannon fodder for wars, "we, too, shall have a voice in the parliaments" which make war. Told by the capitalists that embargo and mediation would hurt business and violate traditional diplomatic norms, Columbia responds that "I care as little for [diplomacy and business] as you care for the millions of human lives that have been sacrificed upon the altar of greed. Such gods may satisfy men who never gave life to a child, but to us women who have paid the price for a human life they are but trash." Finally, America is induced to mediate on the grounds that the people demand it, that war is bad for business after all, and that if the women are denied peace, they will seize the factories instead.[16]
At this point History, which "sanctions nothing, opposes nothing, advocates nothing" but merely "records," reminds everyone that
The great empires of today are the few survivors of the countless bloody struggles in which countless nations have perished and been absorbed by the conquerors. Yet we know that within each of these empires there is the largest measure of social peace every known to suffering mankind, and this social peace covering broad areas is the result of previous wars of aggression and exploitation.... All empires and nations, have their title deeds written in blood.[17]
From this, History concludes that the present war may yet prove a blessing if it inaugurates a World Federation and a Co-operative Commonwealth.
The Messenger, meanwhile, complains that "kings, emperors and presidents are but pawns with which [capitalists] play the game of finance.... Every drop of spilled blood, every whitening bone and rotting carcass is the price we women pay for your profits."[18] When the statesmen demand indemnities for their losses, she asks what ruler will "pay us women for our dead men, for our helpless cripples, for our outraged women.... When the violated bodies of our daughters are uncontaminated.... then it is time for your to talk of damages, indemnities and payments!"
The Banker, livid at women's temerity, protested against any female participation in the deliberation on the grounds that such weighty matters "are not woman's realm; they belong to the world of men." The banker boasted that "I represent the financial interests of the world," and that he befriended "King, emperor, president and czar" alike. The form of government did not concern him, for rulers, however chosen, "all must come to me for gold. For even the democratically expressed will of men I have no fear, for men are so imbued with the doctrine of the sacred rights of property that they will vote for the protection of my interests." The banker, however, feared one thing:
Woman's advent into the field of political action chills me with dread and foreboding. Women, emotional and sentimental, will only consider human life and will jeopardize my interests when in the course of natural events it becomes necessary to sacrifice a thousand or a million lives to protect the business interests of a nation. You may re-make the map of the world, topple thrones, dethrone kings and melt crowns for baby rattles, and I will not suffer. But I warn you with all earnestness that if you open the door of political recognition to women the very foundations of civilization will crumble.[19]
The O'Hares ended their play on an optimistic note. Women and the working class together demand a world federation based on the example of the United States, which combined races and cultures more diverse than those fighting in Europe. World Federation, "a beautiful young woman," creates a new flag from the flags of the world, and inaugurates world peace to "the strains of the Battle Hymn of the Republic." Revolution based on both class and gender (whose exact relationship remained unspecified) saved the day.[20]
"World Peace" was widely acclaimed and performed, but opposing the war became dangerous once the United States entered it. At the SP's Emergency Convention, convened in St. Louis just after the United States declared war on Germany, O'Hare chaired the pivotal committee which wrote the SP's "Proclamation on War and Militarism." O'Hare helped strengthen this militant anti-war manifesto and later used it as the basis for her anti-war speeches. After she was jailed for her anti-war agitation, she predicted that the "Proclamation" would someday rival the Declaration of Independence in fame and significance. She also initially claimed that she was jailed because of her central role in approving and publicizing this resolution. Although expressive of O'Hare's views, "The Proclamation" differs significantly in emphasis from the speech for which she was indicted and jailed (or at least from the version her husband Frank published in 1919, the only full version we have.) The "Proclamation" also resulted in the destruction of the Socialist Party by Wilson's reign of terrorism and violence. For all these reasons, it deserves a detailed consideration.
The Proclamation insisted that the SP reaffirmed "its allegiance to the principle of internationalism and working class solidarity the world over, and proclaims its unalterable opposition to the war just declared by the government of the United States." Modern wars were "caused by the commercial and financial rivalry and intrigues of the capitalist interests in the different countries." Such wars brought "wealth and power to the ruling classes, and suffering, death and demoralization to the workers.... They tend to sever the vital bonds of solidarity between them and their brothers in other countries, to destroy their organizations and to curtail their civic and political rights and liberties."[21]
In a statement that hinted at a possible civil war directed against capitalism, the SP declared itself "unalterably opposed to the system of exploitation and class rule which is upheld and strengthened by military power and sham national patriotism." In words greatly resembling O'Hare's (quoted above), the SP asked that workers everywhere oppose their governments' war policies.
The wars of the contending national groups of capitalists are not the concern of the workers. The only struggle which would justify the workers in taking up arms is the great struggle of the working class of the world to free itself from economic exploitation and political oppression.... In support of capitalism, we will not willingly give a single life or a single dollar; in support of the struggle of the workers for freedom we pledge our all.[22]
The ghastly carnage in Europe resulted inevitably from "the conflict of capitalist interests"; the six million thus far killed "have not been sacrificed in a struggle for principles or ideals, but [are instead] wanton offerings upon the altar of private profit."[23]
The "Proclamation" denounced U.S. involvement in unstinting terms, denying the legitimacy of both the government that had declared the war and of the war itself:
The forces of capitalism which have led to the war in Europe are even more hideously transparent in the war recently provoked by the ruling class of this country..... Our entrance into the European war was instigated by the predatory capitalists in the United States who boast of the enormous profit of seven billion dollars from the manufacture and sale of munitions and war supplies and from the exportation of American foodstuffs and other necessaries. They are also deeply interested in the continuance of war and the success of the allied arms through their huge loans to the governments of the allied powers and through other commercial ties. It is the same interests which strive for imperialistic domination of the Western Hemisphere......
We brand the declaration of war by our government as a crime against the people of the United States and against the nations of the world.
In all modern history there has been no war more unjustifiable than the war in which we are about to engage.
No greater dishonor has ever been forced upon a people than that which the capitalist class is forcing upon this nation against its will.
In harmony with these principles, the Socialist Party emphatically rejects the proposal that in time of war the workers should suspend their struggle for better conditions. On the contrary, the acute situation created by war calls for an even more vigorous prosecution of the class struggle....[24]
The Socialist Party pledged that it would disrupt the war effort and all of the measures which furthered it, including conscription, the taxing of workers or issuing of bonds, the censorship of the mails and the press, and "limitation of the right to strike." The SP would help organize the working class "into strong, class-conscious and closely unified political and industrial organizations"; it would "enlighten the masses as to the true relation between capitalism and war... and organize them for action, not only against present war evils, but for the prevention of future wars and for the destruction of the causes of war." This required the destruction of capitalism, for "the end of wars will come with the establishment of socialized industry and industrial democracy the world over. The Socialist Party calls upon all the workers to join it in its struggle to reach this goal, and thus bring into the world a new society in which peace, fraternity, and human brotherhood will be the dominant ideals." The "Proclamation" also recommended that the SP "extend and improve" its agitation among women, "because they as house-wives and mothers are now particularly ready to accept our message."[25]
O'Hare supported the "Proclamation" not only on an extensive speaking tour, but in the pages of the National Rip-Saw (which printed the entire text). She said that "we will resist conscription with every force at our command, but since the war has been forced upon us, we will use it as a weapon by which we may wrest the means of life from the hands of the capitalist class and restore them to the workers." She predicted that socialism would result from the war; "we wanted it to come by the paths of peace, but if that is not to be, then we will snatch it from the bloody jaws of war." In her bitterness she lashed out against the American people as a whole, saying "our (Socialist) hands are clean, there is no blood upon our garments." She reiterated that "we Socialists are not responsible.... Now when you wallow in your own blood, take comfort in the fact that it is your own fault.... When you are as starved as famished wolves and tax ridden to pay for the privilege of being starved, console yourselves by remembering that you were always good Republicans and Democrats and never, never harkened to the ungodly, unpatriotic Socialists." She even asserted that Socialists would "take no steps to end [the war] until you smug Democrats and Republicans get your little tummies so full of capitalist greed and misrule and criminal blundering that you will gag at the very thought of it. WHEN THAT TIME COMES YOU WILL COME TO THE SOCIALISTS BEGGING US TO SAVE YOU FROM YOUR OWN SINS....."[26] These remarks could only alienate the general population.
The very day after the St. Louis Convention adjourned, O'Hare embarked upon a long speaking tour, in which she gave her address, "Socialism and the War," between 75 and 150 times. Her audiences were larger and more enthusiastic than any she had previously encountered. O'Hare undoubtedly chose her words with care. As former chair of the Emergency Convention's Committee on War and Militarism, she was a marked woman. O'Hare knew that she was closely watched by agencies of the state security apparatus; she herself sent free tickets to local law enforcement officials. Yet O'Hare (much like Emma Goldman) bitterly denounced not only the American government and the capitalists who owned it, but the American people who had repudiated her lovingly-tendered advice. And despite her caution, she was indicted under the Espionage Act for remarks made at a small town in North Dakota. She was then convicted by a specially-picked jury of businessmen, totally unrepresentative of the local population, and sentenced by a vile and biased judge, also specially chosen for the occasion. The FBI, consulted by Judge Wade, admitted that it had no information linking O'Hare with any illegal activities or utterances, but advocated a life sentence nevertheless. Even some Justice Department personnel worried that she was convicted by perjured testimony before a biased judge.[27]
Yet many of the circumstances surrounding her trial and conviction remain shrouded in mystery. She was charged with alleging that American women were now "nothing more than brood sows to raise children to get into the army and be made into fertilizer" and that those who enlisted "were no good for anything but fertilizer anyhow."[28] O'Hare denied having made these remarks, although they were fully consistent with her oft-expressed views. Because O'Hare clearly misrepresented her beliefs in her testimony before the court, her denials of these specific statements are suspect. The text of her speech (which emphasized Socialism as the conservator of traditional values undermined by capitalism) was published by her husband Frank only in 1919, with the explicit goal of helping overturn her conviction or secure her release. Under such circumstances, downplaying Kate's more incendiary remarks would have been understandable. Kate herself soon reneged on her early assertion that she was indicted because of her work for the Emergency Convention, claiming instead that she become the innocent victim of a local intrigue between bitter political opponents over a postmastership--a claim that her biographer accepts.[29] Whatever the details of her trial and conviction, however, her incarceration would have been almost inevitable had she persisted in her anti-war agitation.
Kate's "Socialism and the War," as published by her husband Frank in 1919, emphasized, as had her other speeches, that capitalism had foisted upon the world the devastation which anti-Socialists had claimed Socialism would bring. "Our traducers have declared that we would destroy civilization, tear down constitutions, abolish courts and laws, prostitute ethics and morals, and bring anarchy and chaos to the world," O'Hare thundered. However, capitalism and the war it had bred were the real destroyers. Anti-Socialists had claimed that a Socialist victory would cause a civil war because the capitalist class would resist the socialization of industry; but O'Hare (eliding a key distinction between civil and international war) charged that capitalism bred wars, including the current one. The Kaiser and the Czar, she sarcastically said, were not Socialists; this war erupted despite Socialism, not because of it.[30]
Socialists were also accused of undermining religion, the constitution, and law. Yet the war, O'Hare said, had destroyed all three. The clergy turned their back on Jesus, worshipped the god of war, and praised men who committed murder. The United States trampled its own Constitution, and war was itself the antithesis of international law. Capitalists claimed that Socialists would confiscate their property without just compensation, yet Wilson's war government commandeered the railroads, regulated the economy in the name of war efficiency, and plundered the people with exorbitant taxes. "Gentlemen, the price of this war would buy the railroads and almost everything else in sight; and the Government will get the money by frying it out of your dear old Democratic skins. Certainly we Socialists can smile as the aroma of the frying is wafted to our noses."[31]
Socialists were also accused of undermining the home, destroying the family, and preaching free love. Yet war had wrecked this destruction.
In Europe before the war if a woman loved a man so completely that she was willing to give herself without marriage, the woman was a harlot, she was a scarlet woman, and a thing to be spat upon and spurned. If perchance a child should result, it was an ill-begotten, illegitimate child. The mother was an outcast, and the child was cursed by God and man because of the mother's sin. Then war came, and millions of men were dying. The birthrate was falling far behind the deathrate; there was a great need of babies to replace the waste of war. Then, if a woman gave herself to a man that he might "breed before he died," she was not a harlot or a scarlet woman, she was a perfectly honorable heroine and her child was a patriotic "war baby."[32]
The war had thus degraded women and debased motherhood. "Lust and rapine and outrage ran riot" and the women "have had a greater degradation forced upon them by state and clergy." When statesmen and religious leaders "demanded of women that they give themselves in marriage, or out, in order that men might 'breed before they die,' that was not the crime of maddened passion, it was the cold-blooded crime of brutal selfishness, and by that crime the women of Europe were reduced to the status of breeding animals on a stock farm." These spawn of "invasion and rapine and outrage" were "conceived in lust, nurtured in hate, born to poverty and pestilence and famine," and faced a life (and death) of utter horror.[33] O'Hare, therefore (assuming that she consented to her husband's publication of her speech), admitted using a phrase very similar to that with which she was charged, but claimed that she described European rather than American women.
O'Hare next put an ironic twist on the familiar accusation that Socialism would take babies from their parents and have them raised by the state as collective property. Conscription, O'Hare, insisted, did make sons public property. Conscription means that "your sons did not belong to you.... They did not belong to themselves; they were the actual, physical property of the United States, and its Government had a perfect right, and exercised that right, to come into your home and take your sons and demand their service, even to the giving of their lives." The government savagely punished "any one who made the slightest protest against" this collectivization of manhood, and arrested mothers who demanded a voice in the government which did this. "This is not the time or place to argue the question of whether the conscription law is right or wrong," O'Hare allegedly added; ".... I am just telling you what happened to you, that is all."[34]
O'Hare said that the draft was based upon "the fact that the State is superior to the individual." Socialists demanded conscription of wealth as well as of lives and complained that a tiny minority who would not themselves fight "pass on the matter of life and death for millions of other men." According to Frank O'Hare's text, Kate then said that "They tell you that we are opposing enlistment. This is not true. Please understand me now and do not misquote what I say. If any young man feels that it is his duty to enlist, then with all my heart I say--'Go and God bless you. Your blood may enrich the battlefields of France, but that may be for the best.'" Such a qualification--perfectly plausible under the circumstances--did not mollify her patriotic critics, and only further incensed Judge Wade.[35]
O'Hare perceived the war's origins in capitalist imperialism. But she also asserted that women "think of humanity, we don't think of barter and trade, ocean lines, and traffic in munitions. We think of living, breathing, suffering human beings." Wilson was concerned about the lives of rich Americans travelling on munitions ships in wartime, but not about working-class citizens gunned down at Ludlow, Calumet, or West Virginia.[36] (She might have mentioned that Wilson incited the lynching of blacks and of working-class activists, and ordered the beating and torture of picketing suffragists.)
O'Hare concluded her address by asserting that the war would only further Socialism. "We Socialists have always opposed war and wanted to settle the problems of the race by ballots instead of bullets; but, nevertheless, this war is bringing Socialism a hundred times more quickly and decisively than we ever hoped to bring it by education..... Every single step we take towards winning the war is a mighty step toward Socialism." The American people rejected the SP and were now having Socialism "thrust into you on the end of a bayonet." Socialists were not hindering the President from waging war; "a successfully waged war will mean a war waged by Socialist methods, and certainly that means success for us. If you are willing to pay the price of a world war for Socialism, we must submit."[37] This argument ignored her earlier recognition that war would evoke the savage repression of civil liberties. It also equated government ownership and regulation of the economy with socialism, contrary to her earlier recognition that Socialism demanded not only that the government own the trusts, but that the people own the government. O'Hare, searching for a silver lining, uncharacteristically equated state socialism (sometimes termed state capitalism) with working-class self-liberation.
The National Rip-Saw, meanwhile, had renamed itself Social Revolution in March 1917. In August it announced that its July issue had been seized by the Post Office; when its editors excised everything they thought possibly offensive, their new edition was also deemed unmailable. "Every possible effort will be made to comply with the law and postal regulations," the publication informed its readers.[38] However, it was soon denied a second-class mailing permit on the same pretext as The Masses: the authorities confiscated one issue, then declared the publication irregular, and hence ineligible for the special rate. However, the magazine struggled along.
After her arrest, O'Hare told Social Revolution readers that "the story of my plunge into 'crime' is short and easily told." She had chaired the Emergency Convention's Committee on War and Militarism and thereafter "stated the position of the Socialist party on the present war" at every opportunity. While breakfasting in North Dakota, "calm and serene in the belief that I was a perfectly respectable person," she was arrested. She indignantly and incredulously asked, "Can a political party be crushed out, can present office-holders hope to perpetuate their own incumbency, by suppression of all opposition, by the simple expedient of arresting all rival activities and smothering criticism?" She soon found her question most emphatically answered. Meanwhile, she urged that Social Revolution subscribers pay the steeply higher price necessitated by first-class postage rates. "Do not fear that you will be violating any law," she naively urged subscribers. "SOCIAL REVOLUTION is not a law-breaker--not seditious, not treasonable--it is merely revolutionary. Its mission is not to overthrow the government, but to defeat the domestic enemies of democracy..... Until the mails are definitely closed to the voicing of a working-class program, we must sustain the Socialist press."[39] Like almost all victims of Wilson's reign of terror, O'Hare retained an almost pathetic faith in the ultimate justice of American institutions.
Awaiting her trial, she echoed Emma Goldman: "I know that it is alleged 'crimes' that have lifted mankind from the slime of ignorance; and that it has been 'criminals,' so called by the ruling class, that has given humanity the most noble service." Despite the repression visited upon her, "I have never been more confident, more happy, and more sure of success for the cause to which I have given my life." She disdained martyrdom, admitting that "I would far rather be comfortable than heroic. I would much prefer Florida to jail; and I am sure that I can be more useful to my class outside the bars than inside. We are going to make a fight for my freedom, and test the justice of our courts to the limit."[40]
She was convicted in short order by a packed jury and specially-picked judge, and upon the basis of perjured testimony. She soon recognized that her conviction had indeed been inevitable, saying that "neither the law nor testimony had the slightest place in the trial."[41] Yet her speech to the court before her sentencing certainly fudged her actual position. She alleged that she had merely urged that people "study the philosophy of Socialism," when she had quite obviously insisted that they embrace it. She told Judge Wade that if he felt she threatened the United States, he should imprison her, but warned that a draconian sentence for a mother of four would cause dissension throughout the nation, especially among her many friends and comrades. "The vital thing, the all-important thing at this moment is that we should have a nation united.... You must consider well whether my conviction is going to have a tendency to unite the people of this country or to disunite them." One-hundred thousand people who knew her disbelieved "that I am a criminal, or that I have ever given anything to my country except my most unselfish devotion and service." O'Hare claimed that she threatened only the white slaver, the saloon keeper, and the profiteers "stuffed with the filthy, bloodstained profits of war, [who] wrap the sacred folds of the Stars and Stripes about them." Capitalists and capitalism, in this rendering, remained untouched. Judge Wade, she said, should ask himself whether she would "be more dangerous imprisoned, or outside following the work I have been doing for the last six months?"[42] Vastly misrepresenting the "Proclamation on Militarism and War," O'Hare insisted that
My work for the last six months has been this: I represent the so-called Majority wing of the Socialist Party. We are counselling patience, counselling broadmindedness and tolerance..... This is a time when we must wait, as the mother waits for the pangs of travail.... We must give the nation the opportunity to prove its statement that this war shall be the last of wars, that this war is being fought in order that wars may end.[43]
O'Hare also said that she might serve her country better in jail, for God worked in mysterious ways. "It may be that down in the dark, noisome, loathsome hells we call prisons... there may be a bigger work for me to do than out on the lecture platform. It may be that down there are the things I have sought to do all my life. All my life has been devoted to taking light into dark places, in ministering to sick souls, to lifting up degraded humanity--and God knows that down there in the prisons, perhaps more than any other place on earth, there is a need for that kind of work."[44] The court, she said, could degrade her body but not her soul.
Judge Wade's speech before sentencing, with its demand for ideological conformity and unquestioned obedience, and its talk of "outlaws," "traitors," and "extermination," epitomizes the Nazi-like hysteria of the times. The Socialist philosophy, he said, represented a gospel of hate, and had no place on "American soil either in times of war or times of peace." The
servants of the people have spoken--Congress and the Senate almost unanimously--upon this war. No body of men and no body of women can resist the verdict thus rendered by the great majority of the people of this nation without becoming rebels, outlaws, and, in view of the present stress of the nation, traitors.... The minority must yield to the earnest, eloquent appeal of the President for unity of action and thought and purpose--they must submit or they will be crushed by the majestic power of the nation which will not tolerate traitors no matter under what name they may try to hide their treason. American sons are not going to allow their mothers to be likened unto brood sows, and American fathers are not going to submit to having their sons assigned to no more glorious destiny than that of fertilizer for French soil.
The American people are not going to stand idly by and see these boys that are marching away to the front shot in the back by cowards and traitors. This nation.... will not consent to be stabbed in the back, and would be assassins might as well realize that they must sheathe their knives or submit to extermination....[45]
However despicable Judge Wade's rantings, we must concede that he accurately comprehended O'Hare's true beliefs. O'Hare had asked that he consider her character, demeanor in court, and previous writings before passing sentence, and Wade quoted liberally from Kate's National Rip-Saw and Social Revolution columns, as well as from the St. Louis "Proclamation." His own understanding of Kate's attitude towards the United States government was far more accurate than the version which she presented at the trial, even if his mania for vindictive persecution was reprehensible:
This defendant.... asserts here today that at liberty she could aid the government. Aid the government! Why every day she is at liberty she is a menace to the government. She proclaims that if she is punished her followers will assert themselves and that the cause she represents will gain in strength and power. Let them "assert themselves"--they will find that while this nation is kind and generous, she is also powerful, and that when the loyal people of the country are fully aroused traitors will receive the reward for their treachery.[46]
After her sentencing, O'Hare bravely anticipated her five-year term in the "dank and noisesome hell at Jefferson City"--a sentence which, she said, equalled death for a "woman of my age and habits of life." She vowed that she would appeal her conviction and fight for her right to "raise and educate my children... [and] serve the working class." Reflecting the widespread optimism which characterized left-wing circles at the time, O'Hare claimed that "never in all my life have I been so full of hope for the future, so content with the work of the past and so serene and unafraid as I am in the shadow of prison walls.... I know that the social revolution for which we have worked and longed and given our lives in here at last." It had not arrived via peaceful education as she had hoped, but rather in greed and bloodshed "and the lust for power drunk on a materialist philosophy.... BUT THE IMPORTANT THING IS THAT IT IS HERE and the very foundations of the capitalist system rocks and crumbles under the impact of its gathering forces."[47] In words reminiscent of those of the Haymarket martyrs and of Emma Goldman, O'Hare said that
In all the past history of the race, the birth of each new and better social order has been hastened by the blood and martyrdom and death of its prophets and teachers. I have been a prophet and teacher of the new social order of social justice that must be the outcome of the social revolution forced upon the world by this war.... If I must wear stripes I will wear them as a badge of honor; if I am locked behind prison bars, those iron barriers shall be an altar where I shall give thanks that I was found worthy to symbolize the spirit of truth and progress.[48]
After her conviction was upheld, O'Hare embarked upon a long pre-incarceration speaking tour. Her address, "Americanism and Bolshevism," newly emphasized patriotism--a focus which continued in her letters from prison (mimeographed and distributed to thousands of her loyal supporters by her husband). Denounced as un-American, O'Hare (along with many other Socialists) declared herself the exemplar of true Americanism against Wilson's terrorist government. O'Hare had previously employed traditional values--particularly those concerning marriage and the family, race, and even religion--in the cause of social revolution; now, she stressed love of nation and vehemently denied "the loathsome charge of being disloyal to the country to whose service I have given my life."[49] Once again the tactics of the oppressors determined the strategy and language of the oppressed. O'Hare epitomized the conservative defense of Socialism decried by Crystal Eastman:
How strange it is that we Socialists are the only sane, restraining force in the United States today while the whole weight and power of the Democratic administration is being hurled into the effort to plunge the nation into the throes of a bloody revolution. Not one thing that could possibly be done to enrage and inflame the masses is being overlooked by elected officials.... The radicals are now the conservatives who cling to constitutional political action, while the reactionary forces are now the radicals who would overthrow constitutional political action by force and violence and replace it with mob autocracy.[50]
As Crystal Eastman complained, such rhetoric not only abandoned Socialism in favor of agitation for civil liberties; it also falsely assumed that American constitutional guarantees normally protected working-class dissidents. O'Hare had previously punctured this very illusion.
O'Hare claimed pride in her pioneer ancestors and in her father, who had enlisted as a young boy in the Union army. In prison she wrote that "the only real humiliation I have felt since coming here has been a deep, burning shame for my country. I came here with much of love of country and idealism concerning it that I had inherited from my pioneer ancestors." She complained that in Jefferson City healthy inmates bathed in the same tub and ate from the same table as those with venereal disease; she deplored "the sickening fact that the country which my ancestors helped to found, and which my father gave his life to protect, has forced me to live in constant danger of contamination from the most loathsome of all diseases."[51] (Kate's father, in fact, had long survived the Civil War.)
O'Hare also defined Americanism ahistorically as the eternal striving for freedom exemplified by past worthies such as Isaiah, Wat Tyler, Jesus, and Spartacus; she claimed that this striving had found its first historical embodiment in the United States. She compared the founding fathers with IWW members and other direct actionists; they were, after all, revolutionaries. If they had not created a perfect democracy, they had established "the means whereby we might by our own efforts and our own travail achieve it." During the war, however, the ruling class had redefined Americanism as "mob violence, destruction of the people's rights, and suppression of adverse criticism."[52]
However, O'Hare's patriotism was double-edged as usual. Although she touted Americanism, she also praised Socialists, who recognized "that industrial democracy is the only sound foundation upon which political democracy can be built," as representing true Americanism in its most recent incarnation. Bolshevism, she said, was but another name for Socialism, and was therefore calumniated by the ruling elite. "Privilege is so sterile of ideas; so barren of imagination that it has not been able to think of one new lie; to concoct one fresh slander" not already heaped upon abolitionists, suffragists, Socialists, Non-Partisan Leaguers, and Wobblies.[53] O'Hare extolled the Soviets as based on industrial organization rather than geography (a key IWW tenet); Soviets, therefore, excluded parasites until they began working.
Of course we don't know all the details of the Soviet industrial form of government, and we cannot decide at this time whether we Americans would like it or not. It is quite possible that peoples have tastes in form of governments just as they have in food, or music, or art..... [But] we know that the word Bolshevism simply means the rule of the majority, and we don't fear that. We know that the Bolshevik is the chap who wants the product of his labor and is quite willing that the other fellow shall have the product of his labor also; BUT NO MORE..... [Bolshevism] holds no menace except for those who seek to live without labor or useful service of mankind.... It is immaterial to me what name you call it--democracy--Socialism--Bolshevism--a rose by any name smells sweet to me, and industrial democracy by any name will satisfy the working class. And industrial democracy, by whatever name you choose to call it, is coming.[54]
O'Hare repeated her contention that the war had Socialized the belligerent powers against their will. "Socialism is coming, and it seems poetic justice that it should be thrust upon the world by its most bitter enemies.... The warring nations did not make the long strides towards industrial democracy because they loved the Socialists, or wanted Socialism, but because it is the only thing that can meet the situation and save the world from utter chaos and ruin.... You refused to take Socialism in peace, by lawful, constitutional means. Now you dear old moss-backs, rock-ribbed, hide-bound democrats and republicans have had a little Socialism thrust into you on the end of a bayonet, and it wasn't a Socialist bayonet, either.... If you have been compelled to learn your lesson, and take your Socialism in the bloodshed and agony, the hell and horror of war, you and you alone are to blame."[55]
O'Hare, however, preached imminent social revolution in a sense quite distinct from the socialization of industry fostered by the war. The carnage in Europe, she believed, had disrupted traditional lifestyles and mobilized a constituency for working-class revolution. Returning veterans, women displaced from high-paying war jobs, and women who had sacrificed their loved ones for a democracy which they did not themselves enjoy, would rebel: "We want to replace a make-believe republic with a real republic; we want to live [in] a democracy now that we have made the world safe for it," she proclaimed.[56] In a passage redolent of those penned by Afro-American revolutionaries, O'Hare thundered that
This nation took by force of law millions of young men from their homes, their loved ones and their labor... and taught them a doctrine of hate and slander. It taught them that when autocracy and despotism ruthlessly invaded the rights of the people and killed for its profit, that it was righteous and godly and heroic to demand "an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth," death for death, and slaughter for slaughter..... They went away heros, they come back victors; but heroism without bread, and victory without a job is the most empty glory a man can know. Legless, armless, eyeless heroes are hobbling and groping about our streets today wondering where they can trade a lot of glory for a plate of beans, or a war decoration for some ham and eggs....
They know that the industrial masters of this country have coined their sacrifice into gold; have piled up their war profits mountain high, and are still piling profits by keeping them idle and cheap girls on the job....[57]
These ex-soldiers would not starve like dogs in the street; "in the roar and hell of war they have found themselves and their power" and would demand "not the paltry tinsel of political democracy, but the fire-tried gold of industrial democracy." Jobless men displaced by returning soldiers would also aid the revolution, as would "the hundreds of thousands of women, who have had a taste of decent life and decent wages and will not willingly go back to the slavery of some other woman's kitchen, or the ill-paid drudgery of the sweatshop. This nation must reckon not only with these working women who want decent work and living wages, but it must reckon with the whole mass of women." Such women remained unconsulted when war was declared; but they gave their loved ones for their country, worked at horrible jobs that the war might be won, and stinted themselves and their children "that the warring nations might be fed... Then the war was done, the victory was won, democracy was safe. The women of this nation, flushed with the glow of victory, at peace with their own souls because they knew they served to the utmost, went down to Washington and asked the administration that a tiny scrap of the democracy for which we had been fighting, working and sacrificing might to extended to them."[58] They encountered only indifference and hostility. O'Hare then addressed the American working class, saying that "We cannot prevent the GREAT CHANGE if we would. It is the appointed hour."
But we can guide its coming, if we will. We can welcome it, and it will come in great peace....
Upon the working class of America and of the world rests the responsibility for the guidance of the Social Revolution. Others will help--but their interests are conflicting. At this hour your interests, and only yours, [are] at one with the interests of America and of Humanity. For when you free yourselves you free all mankind.
Organize, then, and educate, and let no man turn you aside from your sacred mission.[59]
As for herself, O'Hare defiantly declared that "I would not, if I could, have one day different; one hour unlived; one deed undone; one word unspoken. I have nothing to regret, nothing to retract, nothing for which to apologize. I am willing to leave my life as I have lived it, and let the future judge between me and my judges."[60]
When O'Hare emerged from prison, she embarked on a long lecture tour on behalf of the remaining political prisoners. She and her husband Frank also re-established The National Rip-Saw. She pledged that the reborn magazine would "use the simple language of the common people, and homely illustrations drawn from every day working-class life... [and] bring the best that science and literature have to offer our readers."[61] Although both O'Hare and her biographer have claimed that her prison experience transformed her outlook,[62] making both feminism and prison reform top priorities, O'Hare's beliefs actually changed little. She remained a staunch Socialist, and emphasized her distinctively conservative form of feminism no more than ever. She worked for prison reform (a previous interest of hers, which the secret, closed nature of the prison system had thwarted) mainly because she could speak with authority and command audiences. She combined her training as a sociologist and investigative reporter with first-hand experience very rare for persons with her education and connections. She was offered posts on important prison-related commissions, and speaking engagements at a time when the radical groups which had previously sponsored her had largely disintegrated. Such changes in her emphasis as did occur were caused by the disintegration of the Socialist party and organized radicalism generally. Her new focus on prison reform paralleled the single-issue reformism increasingly practiced by radicals denied any suitable vehicle for advocating fundamental social change.
O'Hare had previously mingled with the outcast and the damned; she had worked undercover investigating women workers in New York City, had intimate knowledge of the horrors of tenant farming, and had talked with workers engaged in bloody strikes. Her imprisonment, however, was far different: at Jefferson City she became one of the denizens of the nether world, rather than a temporary, if sympathetic, observer. Prison was in some sense a mystical experience for her. Her fellow inmates, she said, knew Jesus
as only a social outcast can. And, strange to say, I came to know Him while in prison, also. As I look back over my life now, I realize that I had always sought vainly to find that soul of universal brotherhood which, for want of a better name, we call the Christ. I tried to find it in the church, in mission work, in the labor movement, and in social service; and always it evaded me. In the church I found an empty creed, in the rescue mission smug hypocrisy, in the labor movement the selfish spirit of "save ourselves," and in social service self-righteousness. One Easter day I found myself in prison because I could not give my sanction to war; and there, for the first time in my life, I felt that I could lay hold of the spirit of Christ.[63]
O'Hare asserted that, for those who had suffered incarceration, "a part of us will always be within prison walls and never again can we walk in freedom as long as our brothers and sisters are shut away from life."[64]
As a trained investigative reporter, sociologist, and respectable citizen with important mainstream political contacts, O'Hare had ambivalent feelings about her fellow inmates, viewing them simultaneously as comrades, alien beings, and the subjects of scientific inquiry. In a statement that regretted even as it acknowledged her own sense of difference, she wrote Frank that "I want to come close to these women, I want to serve them, but I am conscious of the fact that they feel that I am one apart from them.... But I feel that I am gaining ground and in time I will not be penalized for being a 'lady.' One thing in my favor is that I can work." She found "in the management of the institution [a] very interesting study, and in the inmates a wonderful array of interesting fellow-beings."[65]
O'Hare often extolled her fellow inmates as far more moral than ordinary citizens. "One of the most astounding things is the universal kindness of the inmates for each other," she said. "I have heard less 'catishness' in my month here than in one West End club meeting," and discerned more integrity and loyalty than at the Ethical Society or Women's Council. Prostitutes in particular manifested "the real spirit of Christ and comradeship." Yet on other occasions O'Hare termed the inmates sordid, brutal and ignorant. She reconciled these two views partly by viewing the inmates as victims of society. "They were poor, ignorant, subnormal, and psychopathic; but I did not find them bad," she said. "They were as kind and gentle and tender to me, as the harlot who washed the feet of Jesus with her tears and wiped them on her hair.... They are products of society; and for whatever they are, society is responsible."[66]
Relying on her mainstream contacts, O'Hare forced changes which benefitted all the inmates; in particular, she secured better food and cleaner surroundings. She celled near Emma Goldman and the anarchist Ella Antolini; the three of them, she joked, comprised "the American Revolutionary Soviet," the executive committee of which held "nightly conclaves to direct by wireless the affairs of the universe."[67] Goldman and O'Hare received food, clothing, and supplies from their networks of outside supporters, and distributed these goodies among the inmates, earning their affection and gratitude. Goldman, however, was an authentic outcast who closely identified with the prisoners and considered herself genuinely one of them. O'Hare, transcending the political chasm which separated her from the anarchist leader, confirmed Goldman's self-image as an all-embracing Earth Mother. Goldman
had that rare gift; in her it was the all-embracing, intensified sacrificing maternity. Thwarted in physical motherhood she poured out her whole soul in vicarious motherhood of all the sad and sorrowful, the wronged and oppressed, the bitter and rebellious children of men.... Women here worshipped her with an idolatrous worship.... The girls love me too, but never as they loved Emma Goldman. To them I am the dispenser of chewing gum and peppermint drops, a perambulating spelling book, dictionary and compendium of all known wisdom. I am lawyer, priest and physician.... but I do not and never can fill Emma's place in their hearts.[68]
For her part, Goldman said that, had she met O'Hare on the outside, their political disagreements would have rendered friendship impossible. In prison, however, their "common ground and human interest in our daily associations... proved more vital than our theoretical differences." Goldman said that O'Hare possessed "a very warm heart" and was "a woman of simplicity and tender feeling. We quickly became friends, and my fondness for her increased in proportion as her personality unfolded itself to me."[69] After her release, Goldman regaled a testimonial dinner for O'Hare (chaired by Crystal Eastman) with a story of O'Hare's fixation on her hair, which O'Hare (having no time in the morning) elaborately arranged every evening before bed. Once, hearing O'Hare lustily swear, Goldman asked her whether she needed help. The following dialogue ensued:
O'Hare: "Stuck again by a hairpin, darn it."
Goldman: "You will be vain."
O'Hare: "Sure; how else am I to show off my beauty? Nothing in this world can be had without a price, as you well know yourself."
Goldman: "Well, I would not pay for such foolishness as curled hair."
O'Hare: "Why, E.G., how you talk. Just ask your male friends, and you'll find out that a fine coiffure is more important than the best speech."
Goldman said that "the diners roared, and I was sure that most of them agreed with Kate."[70]
For her own part, both in her prison letters and her subsequent In Prison, O'Hare vividly described the mass murder, torture, and oppression of the inmates by sadistic guards. She regarded the prison regimen as itself institutionalized torture. The notorious "silence system" allowed prisoners only one hour of communication each day; inmates who worked and ate together were strictly forbidden the least conversation. In many ways the prison regimen replicated that outside the walls. O'Hare charged that inmates were "murdered in body, brain, and soul by the processes of slow torture." The vermin-infected food constituted death by "slow starvation, in which.... [prisoners] suffered all the pangs of death by hunger, but never knew the blessed relief of death." Convict labor, preformed for outside contractors and enforced by brutal guards, was "a tremendously profitable form of chattel slavery."[71] Echoing her denunciation of wage slavery, O'Hare thundered that
I know from actual experience that the only differences between a woman federal prisoner and Cassie on the plantation of Simon Legree before the Civil War, were that Cassie was sold to the highest bidder, whereas we were sold to the lowest. Cassie also had a market value which made her master give her the sort of life that would not lower her selling price. I had no market value....[72]
The workshop at Jefferson City operated on the task system: each women, regardless of her strength, health, or skill, had the same quota of garments, and was beaten severely if she produced too little. O'Hare (like Berkman, Debs, and other political prisoners) told horrifying personal stories of individual, named inmates who were tortured to death because they could not meet the quota. O'Hare indignantly charged that the system destroyed most women by the time their sentence expired. "The average length of time served is about two years, and the amount of labor demanded was just about enough to wear a woman out physically and send her back to society fit only for the human scrap-heap of the potter's field." Those with longer terms were "transferred to lighter work in the dining room" or elsewhere after they were broken.[73]
O'Hare said that inmates were tortured by corrupt guards who operated illegal prison businesses, while others were forced into sexual slavery. Evelyn, a young and pretty prostitute, defied the vice lords and kept all of her earnings; sent to prison by a corrupt system, she was broken by a process so horrific that O'Hare would not even describe it. "When she had been reduced to a half insane, cringing travesty on womanhood, a powerful politician of St. Louis secured her parole," so that she could pursue her trade under vice-lord auspices. O'Hare bitterly remarked that "even toned-down tales of prison brutalities are disbelieved by ordinary people, because they feel that such things can't be true."[74]
O'Hare believed that prisons represented American society in microcosm. "Our prisons are but a reflection of us, of our ethics, morals, our ideals, our sense of social justice," she said. The prison system was only "the epitome of our economic and social development" and "the true reflection of our national life." Her denunciation of the "blood-stained profits of convict labor," which would continue "until private profits" from it ended, echoed her criticism of capitalism. Although she occasionally acknowledged that some crimes might stem from individual will rather than social failure, she generally blamed crime on "poverty, excessive child-bearing, undernourishment, and overwork." Most crimes were "petty offenses committed in the pursuit of the necessities of life."[75]
O'Hare, therefore, usually asserted that penal reform was impossible without the transformation of society as a whole. "If government would reform criminals, it must first reform itself," she said. Society must consider the needs of the masses and "take from private hands the unlimited power which they now hold to breed war, poverty, and crime, and it must make state morality the pattern for individual morality." A society based upon murder, torture, and theft provided no valid role models for individuals. Government must protect life in peace as it sacrificed it in war; if it could expend billions for war, it could spend millions "making peace bearable for the masses."[76]
The logic of this position precluded any work for prison reform. However, O'Hare was uncomfortable with this conclusion because "social justice is not achieved overnight," and prisoners suffered in the here-and-now. Even political revolution would not instantly inaugurate a decent society; "in the end all human progress depends on the workers gradually fitting themselves to use more intelligently the means of production and distribution of the things necessary to human life."[77] O'Hare, therefore, concluded that
we must patch up what we have so that it will operate with as little friction and waste of human life as possible, while we are building the machinery of the new order.... I realize that prison reform is but a palliative, a sort of narcotic to ease the pain of unbearable social ills. But I also know that there are conditions under which narcotics must be used until nature and scientific treatment have had an opportunity to work a cure..... Sound and intelligent methods of dealing with delinquents must be developed, and we dare not wait until an industrial system giving the full measure of social justice has been established.[78]
Paradoxically and inconsistently, O'Hare's book In Prison also claimed that society could make no progress towards ultimate solutions "until we have civilized and humanized our methods of dealing with troublesome members of society."[79]
O'Hare demanded the total abolition of all existing prisons and their replacement by hospitals, asylums, and rehabilitative work camps staffed by scientifically trained experts and psychologists. In addition, she advocated public health measures which would reduce "the industrial unfitness that is such an important factor in delinquency." Finally, she recognized that "the industrial organizer" prevented crime: the IWW and the NPL had cleansed disease-breeding workplaces, educated and organized their constituencies, and raised the physical, emotional, and mental health of their members.[80] In recognizing the necessity of such incremental changes, O'Hare once again linked her Socialist activism with her belief in ameliorative reform. Her projected scientific study of inmates also resumed the sociological investigations of her pre-war years. Yet O'Hare neglected an important contradiction: if criminals resulted from a fundamentally criminal society, no anti-crime palliatives or psychological studies of deviance would remain relevant in a just society. Criminals who offended for bread would of necessity require different treatment than members of a decent society who violated just rules legislated by the majority.
Just as O'Hare's agitation for prison reform marked only a superficial change in her previous interests and tactics, so too prison left O'Hare's modulated and distinctively conservative form of feminism intact, despite her own claim and that of her biographer. Not long after she arrived in prison she wrote Frank (in a letter intended for wider distribution):
You know that I have never been a particularly rampant feminist; I have always felt that the "woman question" was only a part of the great "social problem" but my two months here have changed my views materially; and I know now, as never before, that "woman bear the heaviest burdens and walk the roughest road" and that this is true in all walks of life, and becomes more damnably true as you descend the social scale, until it reaches the very extreme here in prison.[81]
However, her class analysis generated doubts that women's suffrage--"now practically an accomplished fact"--would achieve much. "I am not particularly optimistic concerning the average middle class woman," she wrote.[82]
O'Hare also complained that the Socialist party hierarchy had neglected her and other female political prisoners. One of her early letters asserted that "I have not received even the printed matter sent out from the National Office, and except from Gene [Debs], not a line from any official or individual prominent in the party." Later that same year she remarked that at a massive amnesty meeting in Milwaukee, "none of the male speakers, and they were all male, remembered that I existed." The male hierarchs overlooked her and another female political prisoner not "because they were bad, or unfriendly, but simply because that is the psychology of the male." In early 1920 she bitterly wrote SP official and personal friend Otto Branstetter that many SP members strongly felt "that I have been most shamefully treated by the National Office." She asserted that the National Office had expended far more money and effort on the five New York City assemblymen ejected from the Assembly because of their SP affiliations than on her own case; even money specifically raised for her defense had been diverted and used for other purposes. She expressed deep personal hurt at her neglect, and predicted dire consequences for the Party. Branstatter replied in a manner of shocked innocence: the National Office was broke, the SP itself practically moribund. Although much of the agitation for O'Hare's release stemmed from her husband and from other radical women (Goldman, Malkiel, Flynn), SP agitation eventually helped free O'Hare after only fourteen months.[83]
Although O'Hare's prison protestations about a reinvigorated feminist consciousness may seem a new departure, O'Hare had in fact never neglected women's issues, although she had usually addressed them in passing and in the course of her discussions of Socialist philosophy. Her stance differed greatly from that of contributors to The Socialist Woman, however. The Socialist women had viewed the traditional housewife as both "the slave of a slave" and as victimized by capitalist exploitation in her own right. The housewife, they said, worked for free, keeping her wage-slave husband in good working order without renumeration. O'Hare, on the contrary, had always emphasized traditional family values and gender roles. At any rate, the time for a consistent emphasis on feminism within the Socialist movement had long since passed. Women's separate bases of influence had ended with the folding of Conger-Kaneko's publication in 1914 and the abolition of the WNC the next year. After that, the SP struggled for mere survival amidst war, repression, and sectarian feuding. Many party stalwarts had deserted or suffered imprisonment during the war; others, demoralized by the destruction of the Left, increasingly focused on single-issue reforms where they had some chance of success, or abandoned politics altogether. Women stressing labor issues and those in the remnants of the feminist movement were at each other's throats over the Equal Rights Amendment, as Crystal Eastman's experience indicated. With both the Socialist and Feminist movements in tatters, unifying the two was as pointless as it was impossible.
That O'Hare underwent no feminist transformation herself is indicated by her eulogistic biography of Katherine Debs, serialized in The American Vanguard, which, in praising Eugene Debs's wife, apotheosized woman's role as helpmeet and invisible engine of social transformation. O'Hare's tribute is in effect a biography of Eugene Debs as viewed from the perspective of his wife. No one who reads it will ever view Gene's life in quite the same fashion again. Yet O'Hare extolled Katherine as a hard-working, anonymous Jenny Higgins, a role model which glorified, rather than challenging or transcending, the customary division of labor between husband and wife.
O'Hare extolled Katherine Debs as the "almost unknown wife of America's best-known labor leader." Gene had evoked the wrath of the ruling class and endured "the stupidity and ingratitude of the workers he served," but at the end of every wearisome journey, Kate awaited him. "Only in these later years are we beginning to understand the all-powerful influences that sex has upon human life and action, and the dynamic power of love satisfied or love thwarted upon human character and achievements," O'Hare said. Science illuminated "the part that THE WOMAN has played in the life of every great man.... Always--back of every great man who loved and served humanity has been THE WOMAN who has loved and served the man."[84] O'Hare lamented that the histories suppressed all notice of the women behind the men, partly "because the love that can serve to the utmost has not always been tethered by a wedding ring and sealed by priestly ceremonies." Gene, however, was one of the lucky ones who "found THE WOMAN and the WIFE both in the same person."[85]
O'Hare averred that "throughout all the ages the ruling class has tried to bribe and buy the leaders of the working class by throwing them the sop of political preferment and social position."[86] 99% of such men deserted their class, largely because
THE WOMAN could not stand the fire of the crucible. Women want home and comfort, peace and plenty, security and social position far more than men. It is natural that they should. Men have the fire and glow, the inspiration and joy that comes from great work well done, but women have only the home. Men develop the social conscience from working shoulder to shoulder in the labor struggle, but women are narrowed down to the four walls of home and all their life and energies are centered in bearing children and fending for them. Men find joy in the clash of labor's battles, but women want the fine and beautiful things of life and are fiercely jealous for their children. The wife of a labor leader who has come from the drab monotony, the sordid struggle, the dwarfing pinch of poverty, want something better for her children than she has known.[87]
Gene might easily have capitulated to ruling-class blandishments had Katherine "been just a little different sort of woman." Gene "had won a bride just a little above his station." Katherine "was all his dreams come true' and "represented every gracious and lovely and desirable thing in life. How natural for him to feel that it was his joy and his duty to give her all of the good things of life first, and give the labor movement what was left? And how natural it would have been for Katherine to have felt that a man's first duty is to his wife and home and family? That is what girls have been taught for generations."[88]
Had Katherine pressed for a traditional life, Gene might have "crucified his love" and remained a labor leader, "but the iron of bitterness would have entered his soul. He might have been Gene Debs the leader, but he would not have been Gene Debs the lover. And the world needs lovers as much, if not more, than it needs leaders." The "great soul, that tender loving heart, that glowing passion, that sublime self-confidence" which characterized Debs was "constantly replenished from the boundless bounty of Katherine's love."[89]
Katherine had married Gene "because he was the one man in all the world for her, and she found that she must be content with the scraps and remnants of his life that she could snatch from his work in the labor movement." Implicitly answering a common working-class male charge against women, O'Hare acknowledged that the uncomprehending wife "has no doubt caused the downfall of many able, brilliant labor leaders"; however, she added that "we must not forget that labor leaders have also failed to understand the cruel, heart-breaking sacrifices they have demanded of their women." Even Gene did not understand what his decisions cost his beloved: "I do not believe that any man can understand the price we women pay whose men give their lives to the labor movement."[90]
O'Hare quoted Gene at length as he described his hectic, busy life. "All this was no doubt a glorious, thrilling life for Eugene Debs, but it must have tried the soul of Katherine. A beautiful young belle does not marry with the idea of having her husband 'eighteen hours at a stretch glued to my desk.' She has a right to expect that he shall be glued somewhere in her vicinity, a part of the time.... For a happy young bride who had a right to expect to enjoy something like normal life it could not have been very pleasant to have a husband whose 'grip was always packed... darting in all directions,' except home." Echoing Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, O'Hare said that Gene's life was "thrilling for the man who was doing it--BUT--it must have been nerve racking and monotonous for his wife. Riding over plains and mountains on engines and sleeping in cabooses and bunks was glorious for the chap for did the riding and the sleeping, but suspense and loneliness must have eaten into the heart of the women who waited at home. A strike is as intoxicating as champagne for the man who leads it, but it is better lees to the woman for suffers the agony of suspense while it is on. Gene Debs deserves all the laurels and honors he has ever received for his heroism, but Katherine Debs deserves a lot of laurels she has never received; for she, too, has been even more heroic."[91]
O'Hare next discussed Gene's resignation of his high-paying, secure job with the Brotherhood of Railroad Firemen, and his magnanimous refusal of the free European excursion the Brotherhood offered him as a parting gift. "And once again the woman in me asks what Katherine felt about this. It was fine and generous of Gene, of course, but it would have been quite natural for Katherine to feel that both he and she had earned that trip to Europe and a few months of rest and uninterrupted companionship. I cannot help but think also what she must have felt when Gene gave up his hard-won position in the order to which he had given, not only the best years of his life, but of hers as well." O'Hare quoted Gene's valedictory speech, in which he proclaimed that he had not sacrificed because in helping humanity he benefitted himself. "I wonder if Katherine did not think what I have thought many times, that the womenfolk of labor agitators are also 'humanity,' and some one might now and then consider their 'sufferings.'"[92]
O'Hare reminded her readers that Gene had suffered a pay cut of almost 80%, receiving $850 a year from the newly formed American Railway Union (ARU)instead of $4000 from the Brotherhood. She acknowledged the nobility of this sacrifice, but pointed out that "it was Kate who remembered that the flames of a glorious ideal will soon flicker out unless replenished by such common, everyday things as beefsteak and potatoes and biscuits.... [and] well darned socks and clean underwear and shirts with full crew of buttons." All men, Gene included, retained "a childlike faith in the ability of wives to provide these unmentioned essentials. It is a sort of magic we women are presumed to possess. Katherine Debs never made a speech, nor wrote a soul stirring editorial, nor attended a great labor convention, but she did run her home and keep Gene Debs fed and clothed and immaculately tidy and ready for his work on $75 a month or less, and that demanded strength of mind and muscle, and genuine heroism of the highest character." She also endured the contumely of old friends and of former allies from the railroad brotherhoods, upset at Gene's new affiliation.[93]
Katherine hardly saw her mate for months on end, O'Hare continued; when he returned home it was for brief recuperation only. Soon he was on the road again. And Katherine also became "office clerk and private secretary for Gene," and found herself glued to a desk. "How many know the vital part Katherine Debs played in the actual work of organizing that pioneer industrial union?" O'Hare asked. While Gene was out organizing, she stayed at home "writing letters, answering questions, sending out literature, arranging meetings, doing the thousand and one things some one must do to keep the wheels of a labor organization turning and a labor organizer on the road.... I am sure that it never dawned on her that she had displayed marvelous heroism and made a place for herself in history. She was simply doing what seemed quite the natural and wifely thing to do. Gene Debs was her man, his life was to struggle to give the workers life, 'life more abundant,' and her duty was to minister to him and to his cause."[94]
When President Cleveland violently and unconstitutionally broke the ARU, and Gene was jailed for contempt of court, Gene became a national figure. Katherine, however, again "paid the heaviest price. No matter how great a woman's love, no matter how implicit her faith in the man she loves and the righteousness of his judgment, no woman can see her man branded as a felon and locked behind prison bars without suffering the tortures of the damned. Women have been bound so long and rigidly by the iron bands of convention and social customs that they are conventional and slaves to custom to the core. 'Respectability' has always meant life to women and any departure from 'respectability' has meant worse than death. And Katherine Debs was by birth and breeding, education and social position conventionally respectable." Nevertheless, she went to Woodstock, where Gene was imprisoned, "and she had come to her lover's prison to wait for him, as Mary of Magdala came to wait at the foot of the cross." When Debs was released to national acclaim, Katherine "was not there to share his triumph. Her's was the woman's part and she had gone on to Terre Haute to open the home and make ready for Gene's home-coming." Still later, when Gene opposed the imperialist world war, he "felt the exaltation that Jesus felt while waiting in the Garden of Gethsemane, but Katherine had only the portion of Mary who waited and wept without knowing that when the hour of sacrifice came she would pay the heavier, bitterer price."[95]
The appeal of O'Hare's rendition of women's role in her biography of Katherine Debs is obvious. It offered pride and recognition to humble, unknown women and the roles they actually fulfilled in their husbands' lives; but it allowed men the comforting illusion that subordination in the home was itself an all-sufficient form of exalted service for women. In this reading, women required only recognition, not equality. O'Hare's characterization of the Debs household left traditional gender roles unchanged and unchallenged, but allowed both partners to feel good (though for different reasons) about those stereotyped roles.
O'Hare disingenuously claimed that her empathy for Katherine was based on her own experience. "I know all about it; I have been a labor agitator's wife these twenty years, and an agitator myself...." she said. "I have been through it all. I think the most tragically lonely days I ever knew were those I spent alone in New York while Frank was out on a long organizing trip for the Socialist Party. After our children Dick and Kathleen came, my husband's long trips were not so terrible; the children kept me company."[96] However, in the O'Hare household Frank, not Kate, most often tended home and children, while Kate, rather than her husband, garnered most of the public acclaim and renown. Kate's apotheosis of Katherine Debs, therefore, was in part a subterranean acknowledgement of the vital role her husband had played in facilitating her own stellar public role. It evaded, rather than confronting, the harsh realities of the patriarchal family which Kate herself had successfully transcended.
Next chapter
Notes:
[1] KROH, "An Open Letter to President Woodrow Wilson," NRS, February 1915; KROH, "Breed, Mother, Breed," NRS, September 1915.
[2] KROH, "Daily Bill of Fare for Hard Times," NRS, December 1914; KROH, "I Denounce," NRS, March 1915.
[3] KROH, "Shall Red Hell Rage?," NRS, June 1915.
[4] KROH, "Shall Red Hell Rage?," NRS, June 1915.
[5] KROH, "My Country," NRS, April 1917.
[6] KROH, "My Country," NRS, April 1917.
[7] KROH, "The Wounded Who Do Not Fight," NRS, October 1914; KROH, "To the Mothers and Maids of America," NRS, August 1915; KROH, "An Open Letter to President Woodrow Wilson," NRS, February 1915.
[8] KROH, "To the Mothers and Maids of America," NRS, August 1915.
[9] KROH, "I Denounce," NRS, March 1915.
[10] KROH, "Breed, Mother, Breed," NRS, September 1915.
[11] KROH, "England's War Babies," NRS, July 1915.
[12] KROH, "England's War Babies," NRS, July 1915.
[13] KROH and Frank O'Hare, "World Peace: A Spectacle Drama in Three Acts," (The National Rip Saw Publishing Company, St. Louis, 1915), 15, 17, 25.
[14] KROH and Frank O'Hare, "World Peace: A Spectacle Drama in Three Acts," 29-30.
[15] KROH and Frank O'Hare, "World Peace: A Spectacle Drama in Three Acts," 30-31.
[16] KROH and Frank O'Hare, "World Peace: A Spectacle Drama in Three Acts," 33-42.
[17] KROH and Frank O'Hare, "World Peace: A Spectacle Drama in Three Acts," 53, 49-50.
[18] KROH and Frank O'Hare, "World Peace: A Spectacle Drama in Three Acts," 53.
[19] "World Peace," 51-52. I have broken one paragraph into two for easier reading.
[20] KROH and Frank O'Hare, "World Peace: A Spectacle Drama in Three Acts," 59-61.
[21] "Proclamation on War and Militarism," NRS, May 1917, p.5.
[22] "Proclamation on War and Militarism," NRS, May 1917, p.5.
[23] "Proclamation on War and Militarism," NRS, May 1917, p.5.
[24] "Proclamation on War and Militarism," NRS, May 1917, p.5.
[25] "Proclamation on War and Militarism," NRS, May 1917, p.5.
[26] KROH, "Good Morning! Mr. American Citizen," NRS, June 1917; KROH, "You are Playing with Fire, Gentlemen," NRS, May 1917.
[27] Miller, From Prairie to Prison, Chapter Six, (127-157); see also the KROH speeches discussed below.
[28] Miller, Prairie, 144-145.
[29] note here: biographer accepts her account that she was railroaded because of postmaster imbroglio; also her own statement of this. FIND THE PAGE NUMBERS
[30] KROH, "Socialism and the World War," in Miller, 121-143. In Prairie, Miller entitles this speech "Socialism and the War"; in Miller and Foner, it is printed as "Socialism and the World War."
[31] KROH, "Socialism and the World War," in Miller, 121-143.
[32] KROH, "Socialism and the World War," in Miller, 121-143.
[33] KROH, "Socialism and the World War," in Miller, 121-143. KROH had earlier claimed that the European governments took care of the war babies because the governments needed cannon fodder for future wars; here, however, she refers to war babies (and others) near the front.
[34] KROH, "Socialism and the World War," in Miller, 121-143.
[35] KROH, "Socialism and the World War," in Miller, 121-143.
[36] KROH, "Socialism and the World War," in Miller, 121-143.
[37] KROH, "Socialism and the World War," in Miller, 121-143.
[38] "To Our Readers," SR, August 1917.
[39] KROH, "A Criminal at the Bar of Justice," SR, September 1917; KROH, "'Hold the Fort'," SR, November 1917.
[40] KROH, "Waiting," SR, December 1917.
[41] KROH, "Guilty!," SR, February 1918. Miller concurs in O'Hare's assessment that her trial was rigged.
[42] "Speech Delivered by Kate Richard's O'Hare Before Being Sentenced by Judge Wade," NRS, February 1918.
[43] "Speech Delivered by Kate Richard's O'Hare Before Being Sentenced by Judge Wade," NRS, February 1918.
[44] "Speech Delivered by Kate Richard's O'Hare Before Being Sentenced by Judge Wade," NRS, February 1918.
[45] "Remarks of Judge Wade Before Rendering Sentence," SR, February 1918. This was a partial transcript of Wade's remarks, accompanied by SR commentary.
[46] "Remarks of Judge Wade Before Rendering Sentence," SR, February 1918.
[47] KROH, "Guilty!," SR, February 1918; KROH, "A New Year Message," SR, January 1918.
[48] KROH, "A New Year Message," SR, January 1918.
[49] KROH, "A New Year Message," SR, January 1918.
[50] KROH, Letter, January 10, 1920, MF, 257-258.
[51] KROH letter, December 14, 1919, MF, 253; KROH letter, April 26, 1919, MF, 212. O'Hare exaggerated: her father survived the Civil War.
[52] KROH, "Americanism and Bolshevism," (Published by Frank O'Hare, ca April 1919), 15-17, 21-23, 12. 6-7.
[53] KROH, "Americanism and Bolshevism," 25-26.
[54] KROH, "Americanism and Bolshevism," 27.
[55] KROH, "Americanism and Bolshevism," 37-38.
[56] KROH, "Americanism and Bolshevism," 45-46.
[57] KROH, "Americanism and Bolshevism," 39.
[58] KROH, "Americanism and Bolshevism," 39-41.
[59] KROH, "Americanism and Bolshevism," 46.
[60] KROH, "Americanism and Bolshevism," 44.
[61] KROH letter, February 15, 1921, MF, 302.
[62] KROH, letters from prison, in MF, 206-303; Miller, 158-191, especially 171, 180-1 (some of these alleged changes are discussed below) claimed prison significantly changed her outlook. See also Jack Hall's introduction to the University of Washington reprint of In Prison, xiii.
[63] KROH, In Prison (University of Washington Press, Seattle, 1976, reprint of 1923 edition), 127.
[64] KROH letter, February 15, 1921, MF 302.
[65] KROH letter, April 20, 1919, MF, 207; KROH letter, MF 209.
[66] KROH letter, May 10, 1919, MF 216; KROH letter, August 2, 1919, MF 229; KROH, In Prison, 133.
[67] KROH letter, June 8, 1919, MF, 219.
[68] KROH letter, January 31, 1920, MF 268. O'Hare somewhat petulantly ascribed the inmates' devotion to Goldman to their infantile nature.
[69] Emma Goldman, Living My Life, p. 677
[70] Goldman, Living My Life, pp. 706-707.
[71] KROH, In Prison, 133, 90.
[72] KROH, In Prison, 102.
[73] KROH, In Prison, 106.
[74] KROH, In Prison, 79-80; KROH, "The Story of the 'Big Yank,' NRS, May 1924.
[75] KROH letter, August 21, 1919, (Miller says that the actual date is August 24), MF, 235; KROH, In Prison, 175, xxvii-xxviii, 76, 79, 133; KROH, "The End of Act One," SR March 1918.
[76] KROH, In Prison, 133, 139-140.
[77] KROH, In Prison, 164-165.
[78] KROH, In Prison, 165-166.
[79] KROH, In Prison, 166.
[80] KROH, In Prison, 167-168. Jack Hall, introducing the reprint of this work, states, apparently without irony, that "Among penologists... only Kate Richards O'Hare advocated employing the tactics of industrial organizers and the IWW in preventing crime and rehabilitating the criminal." In Prison, xxi.
[81] KROH letter, June 8, 1919, MF 218-219; Miller, 180-181.
[82] KROH letter, June 8, 1919, MF 218-219.
[83] KROH letter, June 15, 1919, MF 221; KROH letter, December 7, 1919, MF 249; KROH letter, February 8, 1920, MF 269; KROH letter, February 24, 1920, MF 274; Otto Branstetter letter to KROH, February 14, 1920, MF 270-271. Ironically, attorney general Palmer did not believe SP protestations that O'Hare was innocent, and had been convicted on the basis of perjured testimony; he recommended leniency because she was a woman and a mother of four. Miller, 187.
[84] KROH, "'Home to Kate,'" NRS, November 1921. O'Hare added that every despot and tyrant was warped by a woman "who did not love and did not serve and who starved and parched the love-hungry soul until the victim turned to hate and war and greed as men to narcotics."
[85] KROH, "'Home to Kate,'" NRS, November 1921.
[86] KROH, "Katherine Metzel--The Girl," NRS, November 1921.
[87] KROH, "The Crucible," NRS, November 1921.
[88] KROH, "The Crucible," NRS, November 1921.
[89] KROH, "The Crucible," NRS, November 1921.
[90] KROH, "The Crucible," NRS, November 1921.
[91] KROH, "The Crucible," NRS, November 1921.
[92] KROH, "The Crucible," NRS, November 1921.
[93] KROH, "The Anvil," NRS, November 1921.
[94] KROH, "The Anvil," NRS, November 1921; KROH, "Katherine Debs's Share in the ARU," NRS, November 1921.
[95] KROH, "Katherine Debs's Share in the ARU," NRS, November 1921; KROH, "Gethsemane," NRS, November 1921.
[96] KROH, "Debs the Statesman of the Masses," NRS, November 1921.