"She battled the capitalists tooth and nail for seventy years."

 Continuing the series Mothers of the Movement, Labor Power remembers Mother Ella Reeve Bloor, a Red Mother.

She was one with the 99% ,and fought the 1% on behalf of the 99% for her whole life by struggling to end child labor, to unionize and improve the lot of workers of many trades and industries.  She was a member of the Communist Party ,or a Partisan of the Working Class,  from its beginning in the US.

                                                         

                                                                    

                                                 Ella Reeve Bloor as she appeared in 1910.



"On July 8, 1862, labor organizer and leading communist Ella Reeve "Mother" Bloor was born on Staten Island, N.Y.
As a labor activist, she investigated child labor in glass factories and mines, and worked undercover in meat packing plants to verify for federal investigators the nightmarish working conditions that author Upton Sinclair had revealed in The Jungle.
Bloor was an advocate for political prisoners and conscientious objectors as well as an organizer of mining, textile, and farming strikes. She ran for Lieutenant Governor of New York on the socialist ticket in 1918 and participated in the formation of the Communist Party of the U.S.A. in 1919. Two years later, she served as a union delegate to the Second (Third ?) International. Upon her return from the Soviet Union, Bloor hitchhiked throughout the United States while writing articles for the Daily Worker. Bloor returned to the Soviet Union for the twentieth anniversary celebration of the October Revolution. When Bloor returned to the United States she retired to April Farm, Pennsylvania in 1937.
Ella Bloor was a leader in the Communist Party, a member of the party's central committee during the critical years of 1932 to 1948.
At the age of 78, Bloor wrote her autobiography. We Are Many was published in 1940 by International Publishers, with an introduction by Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, like Bloor another legendary union organizer and leader of the Communist Party.

The book inspired the Woody Guthrie song, "1913 Massacre," about the deaths of striking copper miners and their families in Calumet, Michigan, at a Christmas party in 1913 that Bloor attended..

After her death in 1951, poet Langston Hughes wrote of Bloor, "She battled the capitalists tooth and nail for seventy years.""
 From:
http://www.peoplesworld.org/today-in-labor-history-labor-organizer-mother-bloor-born/

 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ella_Reeve_Bloor


"Ella Reeve Bloor was an adherent of the Left Wing Section of the Socialist Party, which exited that organization to form the Communist Labor Party of America. In 1921 and 1922 attended the second conventions of the Comintern in Moscow. She was also a delegate to the founding convention of the Red International of Labor Unions in July 1921, at which she used the pseudonym "Emmons" and voted on the basis of credentials issued by three locals of the International Association of Machinists.^[10]
She was also a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party USA from 1932 to 1948.
After the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, Bloor became an advocate of American participation in World War II. Later she argued for an early invasion of Europe to create a Second Front."

From:   Sophia Smith Collection >> Ella Reeve Bloor Papers, 1890-1979
 e Bloor Papers, 1890-1979

Sophia Smith Collection Smith College Northampton, MA Ella Reeve Bloor

Biographical Note "Mother Bloor [Ella Reeve Bloor] speaking at a picnic in Akron, Ohio, 1942" "Ella Reeve Bloor, popularly known as "Mother Bloor," was noted for her energetic organizing work on behalf of labor, communism, socialism, and radical causes from the 1910s to the 1930s. "Mother Bloor" was born in 1862 on Staten Island, New York. She married Lucien Ware in 1881 and gave birth to six children between 1882 and 1892. In 1895, Bloor published Three Little Lovers of Nature. The following year, she divorced Ware and in 1897, she married Louis Cohen. In the brief span of her second marriage, Bloor had two sons and published Talk about Authors and Their Works for young adults. Bloor was an activist in the suffrage movement during the 1880s and 1890s. In 1901, she joined the Socialist Party and approximately a year later she divorced Cohen. Partnered with Richard Bloor in 1906 to investigate Chicago's meat packing industry, Bloor took her colleague's name despite the fact that they were never married. Throughout the 1910s-30s, Bloor was an advocate for political prisoners and conscientious objectors as well as an organizer of mining, textile, and farming strikes. She ran for Lieutenant Governor of New York on the socialist ticket in 1918 and participated in the formation of the Communist Party of the U.S.A. in 1919. Two years later, she served as a union delegate to the Second (Third) International. Upon her return from the Soviet Union, Bloor hitchhiked throughout the United States while writing articles for the Daily Worker. In 1930, she married Andrew Omholt, her third husband. Seven years later, Bloor returned to the Soviet Union for the twentieth anniversary celebration of the October Revolution. When Bloor returned to the United States she retired to April Farm, Pennsylvania in 1937. Three years later, she published her autobiography, We Are Many. In her early eighties, Bloor undertook a campaign against fascism between 1942 and 1945. In 1951, Bloor died at the age of 89." .

              http://asteria.fivecolleges.edu/findaids/sophiasmith/mnsss8_bioghist.html


Photo from Peoples' World
                        
                        Mother Bloor with another great forgotten champion  
                                               of Labor, Paul Robeson