RADICALS: Trouble Into Trouble

“I can’t concentrate in jail,” a wrinkled-faced, white-haired, gentle-mannered, old woman told Omaha newshawks one day last September, “so I won’t do any serious reading or any work. This is a pretty fair jail. It’s clean.”

So saying, Mother Bloor, oldest and best known female Red in the U. S., proceeded to Grand Island, Neb. to finish serving a 30-day term for unlawful assembly. It was her 36th arrest.

Last week Manhattan Communists turned out with cheers to welcome her back from jail. For 40 years energetic, strong-voiced, little Mother Bloor has been getting into trouble by trying to help other people out of it. Born Ella Reeve in Bridgeton, N. J., she abandoned Presbyterianism for free-thinking at 14, married at 19, bore six children, became a Socialist. She started her career in the picket lines during a weavers’ strike when she heard that women were getting $6 and men $25 per week for the same work. In New York she worked for a while with the late, great Eugene V. Debs, left him because he was not radical enough. To help get material for the Government investigation that followed Upton Sinclair’s book, The Jungle, she took a job in a Chicago packing plant under the name of “Ella Bloor.” She is now a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the U. S. After a lifetime of hopping from picket line to mass meeting, Mother Bloor at 73 is happy, zestful. beloved, expects to live to be 100. Five years ago while she was whipping up agrarian radicalism in North Dakota she married a Communist farmer 23 years her junior.

Since leaving jail last month Mother Bloor has been stumping the country in behalf of the current No. 1 Radical Cause, young Negro Angelo Herndon, who left Manhattan fortnight ago to begin an 18-year sentence on a Georgia chain gang for having preached Communism to Atlanta unemployed (TIME, Jan. 30, 1933). But Mother Bloor’s great heart was beating with equal sympathy last week for the prostitutes, drunkards and drug addicts who shared her Nebraska cell.

“The funds I got from the Prisoners Relief Department of our International Labor Defense helped me a lot,” said she, “especially in making things easier for those girls. . . . Some of the money went to buy Bull Durham for an old Negro woman to smoke in her pipe. Some went to buy cigarets for a young Finnish girl. And one older woman got as much ‘snooze’ — that’s a kind of snuff — as her heart desired.”