Communist Self Subversion, Conversion, Dissonance, Death: "Mother Bloor"
The Stages of Mental Decline as seen in "Mother Bloor" and others in the 1930-1950s
The first person we lie to is ourselves. Political movements are filled with charlatans, then and now.
In the history of Communism, I think it’s an interesting question to ask when did the activists know, and when did they know it. Meaning: of the established crimes chronic to a particular ideology, when did the participants know that those truths were factually accurate.
History generally does a poor job of capturing this kind of information short of very vivid inciting incidents. It’s difficult to track and trace the development of thought, the gradual evolution of ideas, and how certain historical events and immutable facts gradually moved elite intellectuals from one position to another.
I’ve long thought about writing such a historical work, and have begun outlining it, for all the spare time and grant money I don’t have. But it would be a fun work: tracking the evolution of thought across decades, chasing down the ways in which people fell out of love with an idea like Communism as witnessed through the empirical example of the Soviet Union.
Most of the ardent anti-Communists were, in themselves, former Communists. Few knew better the horrors of the regime than those closest to it.
And it’s worth acknowledging that it’s easy and convenient to dismiss concerns for a variety of reasons. Dissonance is the mind’s first course to resolving incongruity: find an explanation that validates what we want to believe. Find someone or something to blame that avoids having to confront any confession of error or naïveté.
It’s hard to admit that ideology has a hard tie to a specific action. And, relatedly, it’s similarly often hard to even admit that a specific event happened.
The mind, intent on self preservation and understanding what a particular admission might consequentially mean for one’s particular political orientation, stops itself from admitting even the mere fact of a historical event happening.
Communist Emma Goldman was deported to Russia in 1919, and by 1923 published “My Disillusionment in Russia” which, while a left-critique of the Soviet Union, also captured the essential brutality of the regime and how all of the ideals were mere propaganda for the accumulation of power.
Goldman was particularly moved by the brutal repression of the Kronstadt rebellion in 1921. The sailors who had helped the Bolsheviks win power wanted a taste of the better life they were promised. They wanted some of the political liberalization they were guaranteed. They wanted the worker’s paradise they had been sold, or at least some small concession to that end. The Bolsheviks offered them only unconditional surrender. When they refused, they were brutally crushed and thousands were executed.
Revolutions all ultimately, when successful, decide to eat their own. The reality of the aggrandizement of power is difficult to reconcile with the propagandists. If the regime is to thrive and grow, its likely to resort to the kind of repression and violence that no regime cares to admit.
Various left-wing intellectuals had their ‘Kronstadt’ moment at various points in the history of Communism.
Popular inflection points are the Red Terror in Russia from 1918-1922, Brutal Execution of the Romanovs in 1919, the Hungarian Red Terror of 1919, the brutal GULAG system from 1929-1953, Forced Soviet Collectivization of 1930, Ukrainian Holomodor in 1932-1933, the Moscow Show Trials of 1936-38, the Spanish Civil War from 1936-1939, the Spanish Red Terror of 1936, the defection of Walter Krivitsky of 1938, the publication of ‘in Stalin’s Secret Service’ in 1939, and Krivitsky’s suspicious death in 1941, the Molotov/Ribbentrop pact of 1939, the assassination of Trotsky in 1940, the Katyn Massacre of 1940, the Yugoslavian Red Terror of 1941, letting the Poles suffer and die during the Warsaw Uprising in 1944, the Invasion of South Korea in 1950, the East German uprising of 1953, crushing the Hungarian Revolution in 1956, Finally returning the 1.5-2 million German POW slave laborers by 1956, Khrushchev’s ‘Secret Speech’ in 1956, the ‘Great Leap Forward’ from 1960-1962, the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961, the Cultural Revolution of 1966-1972, the Prague Spring of 1968, the Cambodian Killing Fields of 1975-1979, the Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, China’s ‘Gendercide’ abortion policies from 1980-2015.
So it’s not like there haven’t been moments for ‘serious introspection’ for committed Communists and their left-wing erstwhile allies.
These were each moments where the common Communist denominator was not utopianism and idealism, but cynicism, repression, and brutality.
And it is a most revealing question to see what finally causes someone to break, what causes a politico to finally, in their mind, decide that enough is enough.
Here’s a rundown on some prominent ones who have largely been forgotten in the history of the time:
After being ideologically purged from the Party as a Lovestoneite in 1929, Benjamin Gitlow slowly began a process of disenchantment which led him to become a firm anti-Communist by 1939. Gitlow was the former Executive Secretary of the CPUSA.
Journalist William Henry Chamberlin went to Moscow as a journalist and became a committed anti-Communist by 1934 after witnessing the Holodomor.
Ambassador William Bullitt was the first U.S. Ambassador to the Soviet Union. Bullitt was a great friend of FDR’s and one of his senior foreign policy advisors. He was a committed left-wing radical, so in thrall to Communist journalist John Reed that he sought out and married his widow Louise Bryant and bragged to others about the connection. Yet by 1935, his admiration for Communism had distilled down to its essence: that it sought a brutal world revolution through violence so that it could impose its own totalitarianism.
Journalist Eugene Lyons was a socialist sympathetic for Communism who was forever changed by his experiences in Moscow. Witnessing show trials, repression, brutality, systemic injustice, he told the world what he thought in 1937’s “Assignment in Utopia.”
Whittaker Chambers left the party after his friend Juliet Poyntz mysteriously disappeared and was likely killed in 1937. Poyntz had earlier told friends that she had become disillusioned with Communism after visiting the Soviet Union and witnessing the show trials firsthand.
Soviet spy Julian Wadleigh left Communism after the news of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact emerged in 1939, as did fellow Soviet spy Nathaniel Weyl.
Confessed spy Hede Massing gave up on Communism because of the Moscow Show Trials around 1938.
Author George Orwell, AKA Eric Blair, gave up on Communism after seeing it in practice during the Spanish Civil War, ending in 1939.
Howard Rushmore left the party after he was pressured to critique “Gone With the Wind” on ideological grounds even though he personally appreciated its use of technique, in 1939.
Confessed spy Elizabeth Bentley gave up on Communism in 1945 when she saw that people just followed orders under Communist discipline and did not follow their conscience. She was also pressured to do so knowing that her cover was about to be blown, and the standard Soviet way of dealing with people like her was to simply kill them.
Henry Wallace fell out of love with Communism in 1952 when consistent credible reports of the GULAG system and forced prisoner labor emerged in America.
David Horowitz describes his disillusionment with Communism and the left around 1975 when he witnessed its effect upon people he cared about. A woman he worked with, Betty Van Patter, was murdered by the Black Panthers and likely raped and tortured before she died. Her killers have never been charged.
Historian Ron Radosh was a committed leftist until the 1980s, when he kept uncovering the obvious guilt over various Communist cause celebes over the years, notably the Rosenbergs.
These are all the people who had some degree of conscience, and ultimately something gnawed at them, until they couldn’t continue in the same way that they did before. Maybe they were prompted such as in the case of Rushmore or Bentley, but they all saw easier options than confronting that they might be wrong.
It was easier to ignore the killings than to confront them.
It was easier to sideline the injustices rather than acknowledge them.
It was easier to let apathy prevail and say that problems were temporary, or just the result of the challenges of the practical world, rather than let those problems manifest as fundamental philosophical defects.
“You can’t make an omelette without breaking some eggs.”
In looking at the list of defections from Communism, it’s a sad statement that so many of them had to witness dead bodies around them, typically of their friends, before they could part with such a destructive ideology.
The name “Mother Bloor” probably doesn’t mean much to anyone anymore. Like many famous leftists, and even relatively famous political figures from decades past, they have a short shelf life.
The famous speakers and writers and thinkers from three generations ago are largely, sadly, forgettable. They channel public passions in the moment but their relevance and timelessness is like a log steering a river, destined to get washed away in time.
Ella Reeve Bloor (1862-1951) was considered one of the senior people within the history of the CPUSA. She was a member of its Central Committee from 1932-1948. The FBI reports suggest she may have been on the propagandistic “National Committee” instead of the actually-governing “Central Committee” but it’s not clear which she was actually on. She was certainly a major figure in the Communist propaganda of the period.
More than anything, Bloor was an icon during this formative period of time in Socialism’s transition to Communism. What might be called elsewhere the period of Leninization, where the ideals and the theory was translated into the actual practical political application.
Bloor was the old woman who could do something. Bloor was the face of elderly wisdom, an inversion of femininity to weaponize it for communist cause. Bloor represented what every old woman could do and consequently what every Communist activist could do, and then some. If Mother Bloor was out organizing and agitating, why weren’t you? If Mother Bloor was able to get her creaky bones to the rally, why couldn’t you? If Mother Bloor could expand Communism, why couldn’t you?
She was a great human political prop: the apeish matronly radical.
She was careful to do the right things: side with the right causes, side with the right factions, embrace violence to the right degree, toe the general party line for decades.
She had a role to play, and she played it well. For this, she was rewarded.
Play the part, do as your told, receive benefit. It’s almost Pavlovian.
Whereas many older folks feel more disconnected, detached, and consequently depressed as they age, Bloor was treated and feted. She remained relevant.
She didn’t have to spend her final years wasting away on her Pennsylvania farm, “April Farm” which appears to no longer exist. The farm was originally the creation of a far-left millionaire heir Charles Garland who decided to start communes and practice polygamy. Of course there was a dead child involved, but death seems to flock to leftists.
Bloor was living there, and instead of growing old she was writing books, making speeches, being seen and heard!
The best dupes are the ones who so obviously in need of one thing that can be spoon-fed to them. The old want to feel young, the small want to feel tall, the ugly want to feel beautiful. Give people what they’ve always wanted and they are yours.
Mother Bloor gave poor working folks hope for better working conditions. She sold the idea of actual political representation. She told struggling workers that things were better under a better political system. She was a purveyor of false Gods.
If you want to read about vulnerable Americans who were lured to the Soviet Union during Roosevelt’s collectivization decade known as the “Great Depression” then please read “The Forsaken.”
Bloor was well rewarded for this service, including a wide variety of inchoate benefits, but also paid vacations.
As part of her advocacy, she went to tour and visit Russia for months in September 1937. Amusing, FBI files reveal that she was stopped at the border and held for weeks as the Soviets decided whether or not to let their matronly propagandist into the country.
After she was finally admitted, during that time vacationing, she sent this postcard to her grandson Danny Cappel about her travels.
Here’s the postcard:
The boy was 8 years old. The act of sending a postcard out of the Soviet Union was one that was likely to get noticed by the censors. It’s reasonable that she wanted to be careful as to what she said.
But this is what I consider the key line of the friendly note: “Am having the time of my life…”
The Soviet Union of 1937 was not the kind of place where you were going to have “the time of your life.”
By 1937 it was well-known that the Ukrainian man-made famine five years prior had caused cannibalism in the streets of Kiev, where she’s writing from.
By 1937 Russia was in the middle of the Moscow Show Trials, where former Communists were accused of ludicrous crimes, where they were obviously tortured and drugged to make false confessions.
The only way you could avoid seeing what was really going on is if you were purposefully blinded. To everyone else it was pretty plainly obvious that things were rotten with the judicial system and these were people innocent of what they were being charged with.
Surely Mother Bloor saw through this insanity! Nope. She had the ‘time of her life’ in Russia.
Surely visiting Kiev, Mother Bloor saw and noticed the emaciated people who were being starved as a matter of state policy? Surely she talked to some of the workers she professed to know and love so much? Nope.
In 1937 and 1938 alone, at least 1.3 million were arrested and 681,692 were shot for 'crimes against the state'.
Now, I don’t think that someone necessarily knows about the prison down the street. I don’t think someone knows about injustices that are 50 miles away. I don’t think someone can hear screams from 100 miles away, or violence from a nation away. It’s reasonable to let ordinary people off the hook for moral culpability in regimes like this because on some level, normal people are just trying to live their lives and are not availing themselves of politics. They want to be left alone.
But political people like Bloor are different, in that they seek out their position and status within politics. They are chronic consumers of information as political animals.
They are an identified public person for private people to trust, for people to share confidential information with, to inform so that they can spread and amplify the truth.
Mother Bloor spoke before a public hall in 1941, before the war started for America, but as the clouds were forming. Here was her statement to the crowd if her FBI Files held at Smith College are to be believed:
She toured the Soviet Union in 1937, and four years later, in 1941, she’s telling people the Soviet Union has:
no hunger
no unemployment
And that they are likely to be put in concentration camps once war breaks out.
With the benefit of hindsight it’s interesting to note that, when war did break out, somewhere around 120,000 Japanese were interned. 11,500 Germans were also interned, and get much less notice from official academia and cultural commissars. I did not realize that nearly 1,900 Italians were also interned during the war.
2,200 Japanese in South America were seized and held in American camps, along with nearly 5,000 additional German civilians.
How many Communists were rounded up and ultimately interned in America?
Yea, that’s right: none. Not a one. Not “Mother Bloor”, nor her kids, nor her grandchild, nor her friends.
But, you might ask, was Mother Bloor a threat? Was she a seditionist?
Well, her son was Harold Ware (1889-1935).
Again, this is a name slightly lost to time. But Harold Ware was a committed left-wing activist until he died from a car accident in 1935.
Harold Ware was the son of Mother Bloor.
Mother Bloor was a member of the Central Committee of the CPUSA and a regular Communist speaker.
Through the 1920’s, Ware was involved in trying to innovate with Soviet Agriculture. He operated farms and was involved in collectivization.
In 1931, safely back in America, Ware set up pro-Soviet newspapers and periodicals.
Then after 1933, he started working in the Roosevelt Administration in the Agriculture Department under Henry A. Wallace. Specifically, Ware worked in the Agricultural Adjustment Act department, alongside other fine Americans like Alger Hiss, John Abt, Lee Pressman, Donald Hiss, Nathaniel Weyl, Nathan Witt, John Herrmann. A list of people whom we now know, with the benefit of time, were all committed Communists and in many cases, Soviet spies.
Harold Ware, after having experienced the horrors of the Soviet Union in the 1920s and participated in the brutalization of collectivization, having seen the American agriculture industry up close, decided that the real problem with America was: surpluses.
Having seen and heard people starving to death in the Soviet Union, Harold Ware went to work in America buying surpluses in order to ‘keep prices high.’
A Communist used tax dollars to subsidize farmers so that they could let their crops and food spoil rather than sell it to the market, possibly at a loss, as poor people starved across America. Right.
In case you harbored any doubt, Whittaker Chambers said that the spy group that he managed, was known as the “Ware Group” - the group that involved Alger Hiss and other senior level officers and administrators within the United States government. Ware had set it up and made the initial contacts so that this group of people could perform professional sedition in the form of foreign espionage.
These were committed Communists who operated as sleeper cells where they could not only betray secrets, but they could actually control American policy to better suit the needs and service of their Soviet masters.
Mother Bloor made it seem like she was at risk of being thrown in a concentration camp.
Maybe she should have been, considering that her own son had been an active Soviet spy.
But yet, she wasn’t. She was free to spread her mental poison far and wide.
Bloor self-applied the “Mother” label, according to the FBI files, starting in 1934. That was several years after her son Harold had started spying for the Soviet Union. It’s safe to assume she knew about his role in the Communist underground by virtue of her position on the Central Committee.
Was she being playful at explicitly noting that while she was a Communist icon, her greatest role might be in raising Harold Ware to betray America’s secrets? There’s a certain amount of irony inherent in the title, and the timing, to make it suspicious.
Whittaker Chambers never knew everyone who was in the “Ware Group” of spies. He estimated it was around 75. They were never all caught or even named. Chambers himself only named about 20 people as Communist agents, and even tried to get away with only suggesting they were compromised government officials at first, not revealing the extent of espionage at first.
There was never a serious threat of a Japanese insurgency within America but 120,000 paid the price anyway. There was never a threat of a German or Italian insurgency, but 15,000 and 2,000 paid the price anyway, on the slimmest of possible threats, despite overwhelming numbers of Germans and Italians who enlisted in the military to fight their genetic cousins.
But the actual Communists who were actually engaged in serious and systemic espionage? They got to roam free.
The Communist movement was being investigated as a violent insurgent movement. But it was the Germans and Italians who were more suspect.
The Communists even supported Roosevelt’s internment policy. Secondary sources suggest the CPUSA even expelled all of its members with Japanese ancestry.
The reality of Communism was always at odds with its propaganda. Writing books is easy, running governments is something else.
From Bloor’s FBI Files, her time in the Soviet Union lasted months:
Somehow she missed the chronic starvation, repression, show trials, brutality, collectivization.
The plight of the actual workers was a bourgeois concern.
Bloor never saw anything that caused her to change her mind. She lost her mind before she could let it be changed or affected by empirical examples.
Bloor was bought in. On some level I suspect the death of her son seared her beliefs in a way where having to admit the crimes of Communism then meant repudiating her dead son Harold. Admitting the faults of Communism meant admitting that he had died for nothing, for lies.
So if we want to be charitable, that’s how we can excuse her dissonance.
Amusingly, the FBI file on Bloor is filled with esoterica and various trifling trivia, never do these supposed investigative experts wonder or inquire whether Harold Ware was a spy.
They even had some tips to this effect:
The son in question had died in 1935, six years prior.
The son was working in the hotbed of hard-left activity, the Agricultural Department’s AAA.
The FBI knew that Harold Ware was her son. They knew that her only other son was never a government agent.
In this odd birthday tribute in the 1932 Daily Worker, Mother Bloor wishes herself a Happy 70th Birthday.
In the paragraph where she admits to being the “Mother” to Harold Ware, she admits to having been indoctrinated as a youth with Socialist reading material. It’s not hard to imagine she did the same with her own children.
If the trained investigators at the Federal Bureau of Investigation had simply looked into Harold Ware at the time, or any time before 1935, they would have found the following key facts:
His mother was on the Central Committee of the Communist Party USA, CPUSA
Harold Ware went back and forth to the Soviet Union to help with their collectivization policy initiative by running Soviet farms.
Ware’s half-brother Carl Reeve was a fundraiser for Soviet efforts
Ware was working in the AAA, under far-left Henry Wallace as Secretary of Agriculture.
Ware had no known source of funds to start his Agricultural research operations
Whittaker Chambers later named 10 AAA employees as active agents of Soviet espionage during this period of time:
If the FBI had taken the available evidence and just taken the moment to look a little further, they would have uncovered the most significant spy ring in American history.
It strains credulity to think that they didn’t or just happened to miss this development.
It’s not like, in 1941, eight years prior to the Hiss trials, that J. Edgar Hoover would suspect that the spy ring (called an ‘apparatus’) would be burying their files for some reason at Mother Bloor’s farm, April Springs?
Gosh, if only the FBI knew to look at the known associates and workplaces of Mother Bloor’s child Harold who worked at senior levels of the administration, overseeing one of the most public programs in the country.
Hoover at the FBI knew not to challenge the Mafia, he knew not to offend FDR, and he knew to cooperate with British intelligence. The Soviets were so active and frankly so unchallenged for so long, that one wonders if a similar arrangement wasn’t worked out.
April Farms was also noted by the FBI in its files on Bloor for proposing joining Nazi organizations, in what is obviously a method of agent provocateur, where their crypto-commies could gather and collect information and then instigate violence to bring down official sanction.
Nowadays we call that maneuver the “Ray Epps.”
Promote sedition, infiltration, violence, espionage: nothing to see here!
Somehow Mother Bloor just happened to escape those communist concentration camps!
Hoover wrote a memo on June 30 1942 advocating for the ‘custodial detention’ of her then-husband Andrew Omholt, but oddly not Bloor.
In 1951 Mother Bloor was given a triumphant funeral. Hers was a triumph of steadfastly standing by a murderous ideology that accomplished nothing but the amplification of human misery to Biblical proportions.
Artist Alice Neel even made a painting of her funeral, the “Death of Mother Bloor.” Half the radicals today would probably genuflect, while the other half would mutter something about ‘white saviorism.’
The kids would also say “rest in power” these days. But that wasn’t how her final days met Bloor. In fact, it ended up being quite comical.
Again, from the Bloor FBI files about her final days, it seems Mother Bloor’s last days were not as a proletarian champion, but that of an entitled, old, senile woman prone to saying ‘something that she should not’ that might endanger her fellow Communists.
Bloor died on August 10, 1951 and was laid to rest in Camden, NJ on August 15th.
The Bloor papers are at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts. A few hundred of Bloor’s letters are at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
Solid! We really need a thorough, comparative history of the relatively mild "Red Scare" with the actual infiltration and repression against the Right and, now, ordinary people. You've begun that work here.
But what I really wanna know is...
When do we get the deets on Ann Richards? You didn't post that for nothing.