Ella Reeve Bloor

Ella Reeve Bloor (born July 8, 1862, near Mariners Harbor, Staten Island, N.Y., U.S.—died Aug. 10, 1951, Richlandtown, Pa.) was an American political organizer and writer who was active as an American socialist and communist, both as a candidate for public office and in labour actions in several industries.

Ella Reeve grew up in Bridgeton, New Jersey. After her marriage to Lucien Ware in 1881 or 1882 (they later divorced), she became involved in a number of reform movements, notably the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union and the women’s rights movement. She contributed articles on political subjects to various periodicals and also published Three Little Lovers of Nature (1895), a textbook, and Talks About Authors and Their Work (1899). In 1897 she joined the Social Democratic Party, formed that year by Eugene V. Debs and Victor L. Berger. In 1898 she moved to the more radical Socialist Labor Party, headed by Daniel De Leon, but in 1902 she returned to Debs’s renamed Socialist Party of America.

For the next 17 years she was a tireless and effective organizer for the party, particularly in Connecticut, where in 1908 she became the first woman to run for state office when she filed for secretary of state. In Pennsylvania, Michigan, Colorado, Ohio, New York, and elsewhere, she organized strike and striker-relief activities among miners, hatters, steelworkers, needleworkers, and others. In 1905 she helped Upton Sinclair gather information on the Chicago stockyards for his book The Jungle, and at his invitation she served in 1906 on a presidential commission investigating conditions there. In Chicago she had worked under the assumed name of Mrs. Richard Bloor, and thenceforward she was known among workers and fellow socialists by the affectionate nickname Mother Bloor. In 1910 she joined in forming the National Women’s Committee of the Socialist Party. She ran for lieutenant governor of New York in 1918.

She was among the radical faction of the Socialist Party that was expelled in 1919 and then organized independently as the Communist Labor Party. She continued her ceaseless organizing on behalf of the new party and in 1921 and 1922 was selected to attend the first and second Red International of Labor Union conventions in Moscow. From 1922 to 1948 she sat on the Central Committee of the Communist Party. During the 1930s she was especially active in organizing the United Farmers’ League. She also worked to achieve an equal voice for women within the Communist Party. She campaigned on behalf of the party line first against and then, after the German invasion of the Soviet Union, for American participation in World War II. In 1938 she was the party’s candidate for governor of Pennsylvania. In her autobiography, We Are Many (1940), she claimed proudly that in her long career as an organizer she had been arrested “hundreds” of times, the last in Nebraska in 1936, when she was 74 years old.