A look at some of the events in the full life of Ella Reeve Bloor on her 69th birthday.

‘Mother Bloor—A Fighter for the Working Class for Many Years’ by Charlotte Todes from Working Woman. Vol. 2 No. 7. July, 1931.

“Don’t think I am getting old. I can work harder, I can fight, and they say I can talk better than ever,” writes Ella Reeve Bloor, one of the foremost woman fighters in our ranks who, on July 8, celebrates her 69th birthday, rounding out a half century of uninterrupted activity in the cause of the working class.

Out in the farming regions of North Dakota, where she is now state organizer of the United Farmers’ League, Ella Reeve Bloor is doing the pioneer job of winning the poor farmers, their wives and children, into a strong fighting organization to resist the exploitation of the bankers and big farmers who are evicting them from their homes and depriving them of their land. Those who have lived in the “open spaces” of the west know the hardship of organizing workers and farmers separated from each other by hundreds of miles of country and often impassable roads.

Undaunted by these obstacles, Ella Reeve Bloor travels thousands of miles a week to reach remote townships and villages to arouse the farmers to the need of organizing.

The life of Ella Reeve Bloor is an epic of American labor history and a symbol of the fighting spirit of the American working women. For Ella Bloor is known to the miners, the textile workers and to thousands of other workers as “Mother Bloor,” and has participated in some of the most heroic struggles of the men and women workers of America against the brutality and oppression of the capitalist class.

A mother of six children, she has nevertheless been in the front ranks in almost every major industrial struggle; among the miners in Ludlow, when the brutal Rockefeller gunmen set fire to the quarters of the wives and children of the striking miners and burned them to death; in Herrin when miners were murdered and during other strikes and struggles, to build the United Mine Workers of the American, Federation of Labor when it was a fighting organization; in Lawrence during the strike of 1912, and in Gastonia.

Many of the forty thousand miners now engaged in a valiant struggle to win better conditions, know Mother Bloor. During the days when the miners, realizing that they must break away from the Lewis machine and overthrow the reactionary leadership of the American Federation of Labor sought to launch a movement for a new militant leadership within the AF of L and organized the Save the Union movement, Mother Bloor went to the mining fields, and helped to organize the campaign which later resulted in a convention at which one thousand delegates were present. Mother Bloor was seated as a regular delegate.

Later when the course of events showed that the only real hope of building a militant leadership and a fighting union for struggle again the exploiting mine operators was in the establishment of a new and revolutionary union free from the corruption and treachery of American Federation of Labor domination, Mother Bloor was active in helping to build the National Miners’ Union which is now leading the nationwide strike against the operators. At the historic convention for the launching of the new National Miners’ Union, Mother Bloor was a delegate with 25 miners from Indiana which was attacked by thugs hired by John L. Lewis, president of the United Mine Workers Association, in a frantic attempt to prevent it. Despite police terror and a cordon of dicks ready to arrest all delegates, the convention was held.

The National Miners’ Union was born in struggle to carry on the revolutionary traditions of the miners’ union and to fight for a decent wage and living conditions for the tens of thousands of the starving miners and their families. The first local in Kentucky to join the National Miners’ Union was organized through the efforts of Mother Bloor. She writes: “The first strike ever won by our militant union was won right there in Kentucky.”

Mother Bloor’s activities dates from the days when she first joined the Socialist Party and became one of its national organizers. During the war when the most militant sections of the Socialist Party split away and later formed the Communist Party, Ella Reeve Bloor joined with the left wing socialists and became a charter member of the Communist Party.

Later she became an organizer for the Party and helped form the first state organizations of Kansas, Missouri and Nebraska.

In 1921 Comrade Bloor attended the first congress of the Red Trade Union International as delegate from the left wing trade union groups in America. At this time the first international convention of working women was being held in Moscow. As the only American woman delegate, Comrade Bloor served on the presidium of the convention with Clara Zetkin, the German revolutionary leader, Kolontai, recently ambassador to Mexico and Norway from the Soviet Union, and others. Of this convention Mother Bloor writes:

“Thirty or more women arrived from the far south western part of the USSR; from Turkestan, Adzerbijian and other sections. They had come by freight trains, wagons, etc. Many of them still wore the heavy Turkish veils. One of them rose to speak and she said, ‘Comrades, this motherland of ours seems like a fairy tale to us, we are all sisters in the fight for freedom from slavery. The women then removed their veils, never to put them on again.”

Since then Mother Bloor has also attended conventions in the Soviet Union of the Red Trade Union International and the Communist International. She is a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the US.A.

On her 69th birthday, the Working Woman, in behalf of the militant working women of the U.S., greet Mother Bloor, and look forward to many more years of activity. Her dauntless courage, her tireless and unceasing work in behalf of the working class and her faith in the working class to conquer is an inspiration to continue the fight for freedom and emancipation of the workers from capitalist rule.

The Working Woman, ‘A Paper for Working Women, Farm Women, and Working-Class Housewives,’ was first published monthly by the Communist Party USA Central Committee Women’s Department from 1929 to 1935, continuing until 1937. It was the first official English-language paper of a Socialist or Communist Party specifically for women (there had been many independent such papers). At first a newspaper and very much an exponent of ‘Third Period’ politics, it played particular attention to Black women, long invisible in the left press. In addition, the magazine covered home-life, women’s health and women’s history, trade union and unemployment struggles, Party activities, as well poems and short stories. The newspaper became a magazine in 1933, and in late 1935 it was folded into The Woman Today which sought to compete with bourgeois women’s magazines in the Popular Front era. The Woman today published until 1937. During its run editors included Isobel Walker Soule, Elinor Curtis, and Margaret Cowl among others.

PDF of full issue: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/wt/v2n07-jul-1931-WW-R7414.pdf