Mary Heaton Vorse
Mary Heaton Vorse (October 11, 1874 – June 14, 1966) was an American journalist and novelist. She established her reputation as a journalist reporting the labor protests of a largely female and immigrant workforce in the east-coast textile industry. Her later fiction drew on this material profiling the social and domestic struggles of working women. Unwilling to be a disinterested observer, she participated in labor and civil protests and was for a period the subject of regular U.S. Justice Department surveillance.
Early life[edit]
Mary Heaton was born October 11, 1874, in New York City to Ellen and Hiram Heaton. Her father was a successful hotelier, but the family's fortune, which was considerable, was her mother's legacy as the widow of Captain Charles Bernard Marvin, a shipping magnate and liquor merchant.
From the family home in Amherst, a college town in western Massachusetts, she travelled extensively with her parents. They variously wintered in California and in Europe: she attended kindergarten in Hanover and the first year of grade school in Dresden. While her father encouraged an interest in history, her mother was sufficiently unconventional to induce a disdain for the restrictions of ladies' fashion (Ellen Heaton was a supporter of the women's dress reform movement) and to indulge her daughter in the study of art, first in Paris and then, in 1896, at the Art Students' League in New York City. While Mary found participation in the artistic avant-garde exhilarating, she was herself to conclude that she had only modest talents as a visual artist.[1]
Marriages and children[edit]
In 1898, Mary Heaton met and married Albert White Vorse, a thirty-two-year-old newspaperman, arctic adventurer and aspiring author. They began to take an interest in the social questions of the day, spurred by the muckraking reformist politics of the era and their friendship with radical journalist Lincoln Steffens. Bert was soon assigned to Paris as the correspondent of the Philadelphia Ledger.[2] It was in France that Mary, encouraged and instructed by her husband, began to try her own hand at professional writing.[3]
For a time the Vorses settled in Venice. There she received what she later claimed was her baptism into the labor movement as a witness to the 1904 Italian general strike. In a procession of two thousand people, Mary Vorse made giddy by what she called the “peculiar, beautiful contagion” of mass solidarity, marched arm in arm with two girl workers down the Merceria to the Grand Canal.[4]
The couple had two children: a boy, Heaton Vorse, born in 1901 and, after the couple moved to Provincetown in 1906, a girl, Mary Vorse, Jr., born in 1907.[5] On June 14, 1910, Bert died of a cerebral hemorrhage.[6]
In 1912, Vorse married the journalist Joe O'Brien, a socialist and fellow suffragist from Virginia. In 1914 the couple had a child, Joel. The following year, the boy's father died of stomach cancer, and Vorse was again a single mother.[7]
Fiction writer[edit]
Emancipated heroines[edit]
Vorse had published her first short story in a local newspaper at the age of sixteen. With Albert Vorse's encouragement, at the age of 29 she found herself reeling off short magazine fiction "like a regular phonograph”—typically stories of rugged and energetic heroines who managed to win the affection of a coveted male over a more constrained and conventionally feminine rival.[34] Beginning with The Breaking-In of a Yachtsman’s Wife (1908), her first novels drew on the experiences of her first years of marriage. They blame not only men for failing to understand women, but also women for embracing their own subservience, whether to husbands or to children. Her 1911 novel The Very Little Person emphasizes how little middle-class men were expected to know about children and about women's maternal experiences when a young father is bewildered by the affection he feels for his daughter. The Autobiography of an Elderly Woman, also published in 1911 is a portrait of the pleasures, regrets, and grievances of a middle-class grandmother who fights daily to be her own person.[35]
At this time, Vorse also wrote several ghost stories, including "The Second Wife" (1912).[36][37] The stories were later collected in the Ash-Tree Press volume Sinister Romance : Collected ghost stories.
Vorse's 1915 novel I’ve Come To Stay: A Love Comedy of Bohemia employs “blue serge lining”—a reference to the fabric that protected the inside of tailored coats and suits, forming a barrier between the self and the world—as a metaphor in the struggle of her heroine to break free of a stultifying bourgeois upbringing. Camilla embraces the bohemian culture of Greenwich Village complete with anarchist friends and a Polish violinist lover and rejects the suit of her neighbor, the equally middle-class Ambrose Ingraham, for fear that he will once again wrap her up in blue serge.[35] She describes the excesses of life in the village as an embrace of the "unfulfilled joys which died unborn in our parents' souls" and as casting away of "decencies in our endeavor not to be hypocritical."[38]
Collaborative novels[edit]
Vorse worked on two collaborative, or composite, novels organized by the active suffragist and editor of Harper's Bazaar, Elizabeth Jordan. In 1907 Vorse was one of a dozen authors—among them Henry James and William Dean Howells—who each contributed a chapter to The Whole Family, a multi-generational saga first serialized in Jordan's magazine and then published by Harper's as a book in 1908. The project was originally conceived by Howells as a showpiece of his brand of literary realism[39] but his vision for the book was disrupted by the agency the women writers insisted on giving the female characters.[40]
In 1917, along with thirteen other authors ready to donate the royalties to the suffragist cause, including Fannie Hurst, Dorothy Canfield Fisher, Alice Duer Miller, Ethel Watts Mumford, Henry Kitchell Webster and William Allen White, Vorse collaborated again with Jordan in The Sturdy Oak. The novel was serialized in Collier's Weekly.[41] and then published as a novel by Henry Holt & Company in 1917.[42] Set in upstate New York, it anticipates the state's 1917 referendum on women's suffrage.[43] Idealistic reformers are pitted against a ruthless political machine, and the traditional picture of man as "the sturdy oak" supporting woman, "the clinging vine", is ridiculed,[44]
Strike![edit]
With the exception of The Ninth Man (1918), a novel set in 12th-century Italy, her subsequent book-length publications drew on her radical journalism. They vary from compilations recording her coverage of actual events, such as Men and Steel (1920), The Passaic Textile Strike, 1926-1927 (1927), and Labor's New Millions (1938), to novels: Second Cabin (1928) based on her homeward voyage from inflation-ravaged postwar Germany and post-revolutionary Russia.[38] and Strike (1930).[45]
Strike! was the first of several "Gastonia novels" by different writers inspired by the Loray Mill strike of 1929.[46][47] In Gastonia, North Carolina, Fred Beal led the Communist Party's National Textile Workers' Union in a first effort to organize in the union-free South. His counterpart in the novel, Fer Deane, under constant threat of assassination leaves much of the work to Irma Rankin and the chief protagonist Mamie Lewes, characters recognizable as Beal's assistants Vera Buch Weisbord and Ella May Wiggins.
Lewes, like Wiggins, is a working women, a single mother, and the balladeer of the movement. While at the center of the "maternal solidarity" that maintains the strike, she contends on all sides with male presumption. She resists Deane's demand that he be given direction of a strike in which it is the women who “man” the dangerous picket lines, and tires of a middle-class Communist-Party activist from the north who befriends her partly, it seems, for the pleasure of hearing himself lecture. The murder of Wiggins preceded a final police descent upon the strikers' tent city that, in turn, leads to Beal and five co-defendants being convicted of second-degree murder in the death of the local police chief. In the novel (completed before Beal and his co-defendants skipped bail and escaped to the Soviet Union) the death of Lewes leads to the decisive martyrdom of an otherwise indecisive Deane: he joins in the final act of resistance and, with five other men, is killed.[48]
For ten years, from 1932 to 1942, Vorse was a regular short-story contributor to The New Yorker.[49]
Awards[edit]
Four years before her death in 1966, the 88-year-old Vorse entered the silver jubilee banquet of the United Auto Workers, accompanied by union leader Walter Reuther. There, she received the first UAW Social Justice Award, with former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt and novelist Upton Sinclair looking on to share her honor.[50] Vorse was feted for her work as one of the most important labor journalists of the 1920s and 1930s.[32]
Death and legacy[edit]
Vorse died of a heart attack on June 14, 1966, at her home in Provincetown, Massachusetts, on the extreme tip of Cape Cod, where she was buried. She was 92 years old.
In addition to her memoir written in 1935, Vorse participated in an oral history project at Columbia University in 1957, an interview that was transcribed and microfilmed by the university. In 1966, her children Heaton Vorse, Mary Ellen Boyden, and Joel O'Brien, deposited their mother's papers with the Archives of Labor History and Urban Affairs, Walter P. Reuther Library, Wayne State University, in Detroit. The collection covers the period from 1841 to 1966. The rich documentary record of her personal life that she normally maintained is missing for the early 1920s. It is possible that she found a record of this time—a period marked by her affair with Robert Minor.and her absence from her children—too painful to preserve. She may also have nursed a lingering fear of red baiting. In her autobiography, Vorse described herself, simply, as "a woman who in early life got angry because many children lived miserably and died needlessly."[51]
John Dos Passos, a longtime friend of Vorse's who owned a Provincetown house not far from hers, is said to have drawn on "her quality of willed self-creation" when he invented Mary French, an ill-fated labor organizer in The Big Money, the third volume of his U.S.A. trilogy.[32]
In 2020, Vorse's Provincetown house, to which she dedicated a chapter in her 1942 memoir Time and the Town: A Provincetown Chronicle was restored. With the agreement of her granddaughters, the 18th century eight-bedroom property has been rededicated as a community arts center.[52][53]
Timeline of journalism and political activity[edit]
Compiled from notes to the Mary Heaton Vorse Collection at Wayne State University[29] and from Dee Garrison's biography.[54]
1910: New York City Women's Suffrage Party, district chair. Campaign to reduce the city's infant mortality rate.
1911: Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, New York City.
1912: Lawrence Textile Strike for Harper's Weekly.
1913: Budapest: International Woman Suffrage Convention (delegate and reporter).
1914: Unemployment protest movement, New York City.
1915: The Hague: International Congress of Woman. Holland, France, Germany, Switzerland, England: war correspondent, covering the effects of war on civil populations.
1916: Mesabi Iron Range Strike. Minnesota, Michigan.
1917–18: Labor under wartime: working conditions, labor unrest, living conditions. Pamphlets on the rights of small nations (Poland, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia) for the Committee on Public Information.
1918–19: Europe. England, France, Germany, Italy, Austria, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia. Publicity for the Red Cross, the Balkan Commission, and the American Relief Administration. Articles and news stories; studies of postwar conditions in industrial areas.
1919: Switzerland. Second International Socialist Conference. Steel Strike. Pittsburgh, Homestead, Braddock. Weekly newspaper stories and publicity releases for the Steel Workers Organizing Committee.
1920: Sacco and Vanzetti case.
1920–21: Amalgamated Clothing Workers. Organizational drive; lockout.
1921: Palmer Raids.
1921–22: Soviet Russia: political conditions, famine.
1922–23: Trial of syndicalists in Michigan.
1926–27: Passaic textile strike, New Jersey
1929: Loray Mill Strike, Gastonìa, North Carolina.
1931–32: The Harlan County Coal War, Kentucky. The rise of Hitler. Stalin's collectivization.
1932: Farmers Holiday Association. Hunger March on Washington
1933: Scottsboro retrial. Austria, England, Germany. The London Economic Conference. The rise of Hitler.
1935–36: Office of Indian Affairs. Editor of Indians at Work.
1936–37: C.I.O. organizational drives in various industries: automobile, steel, textiles, etc.
1937: UAW sit-down strikes, Flint, Michigan. The Little Steel Strike, Youngstown, Pennsylvania
1939: France, Germany, Yugoslavia, the invasion of Poland.
1943: Extensive travels throughout the U.S.: labor and the civilian population during wartime.
1945–47: Europe. Publicity for U.N.R.R.A.; freelance reporting. France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Yugoslavia
1949: Mexico. The Sinarquîstas.
1950: Reuther's Treaty of Detroit. White House Conference on Children and Youth.
1950–54: New York–New Jersey waterfront. Crime and corruption on the waterfront; problems of dock workers.
1959: The Harriet-Henderson textile strike, Henderson, North Carolina.
