O'Hare, Kate Richards (1876–1948)

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O'Hare, Kate Richards (1876–1948)

Prominent leader of the Socialist Party of America, working on behalf of social democratic reforms, workers' rights, women's issues, and prisoners' rights, who was imprisoned for her opposition to World War I. Name variations: Kate Cunningham. Born Carrie Kathleen Richards on March 26, 1876, in Ottawa County, Kansas; died in Benicia, California, on January 10, 1948, of a heart attack; daughter of Andrew Richards and Lucy (Sullivan) Richards, both homesteaders; attended Ottawa County public schools, Central High School, Kansas City, Missouri; Pawnee City (Nebraska) Academy, teaching certificate, 1893; married Francis P. O'Hare, on January 1, 1902 (divorced 1928); married Charles C. Cunningham, in November 1928; children: (first marriage) Richard (b. 1903);Kathleen O'Hare ; twins Victor and Eugene.

Moved with family to Kansas City, Missouri (1887); taught for one year at a rural school; worked for the Florence Crittenton Mission (1896); undertook clerical work and then became a machinist in her father's shop and joined the International Order of Machinists; became interested in labor issues and joined the Socialist Party of America; trained at a school for socialist organizers (1901), where she met and married fellow student Frank P. O'Hare; traveled cross country speaking on behalf of the Socialist Party; had children while family lived in Kansas City, Kansas, and homesteaded in Oklahoma (1904–08); became a columnist for various socialist newspapers and toured constantly as a socialist lecturer; held national offices in the Socialist Party, including its representative to the international socialist movement in London (1913); ran for the U.S. House of Representatives in Kansas (1910); moved to St. Louis (1911) as columnist and associate editor of the National Rip-Saw; ran for the U.S. Senate from Missouri (1916); opposed U.S. intervention in World War I; indicted in Bowman, North Dakota, and convicted under the Espionage Act for antiwar speeches; served 14 months of a 5-year sentence in the Missouri State Penitentiary (1919–20); toured on behalf of amnesty for political prisoners and the abolition of prison contract labor; founded Commonwealth College of New Llano, Louisiana (1923), and, later, of Mena, Arizona; served on the staff of Upton Sinclair's End Poverty in California movement (1934–35); appointed to the staff of Progressive Congressman Thomas R. Amlie of Wisconsin (1937); worked on the staff of the California Director of Penology (1939–40).

Selected works:

What Happened to Dan, The Sorrows of Cupid, and Kate O'Hare's Prison Letters.

In 1914 when World War I erupted, Kate O'Hare published numerous columns condemning the war as an imperialist adventure and, earlier than most social critics, warned against the possibility of U.S. intervention. In April 1917, she chaired the key policy-making committee at the Emergency Convention of the Socialist Party which met during the same week that the U.S. Congress declared war on Germany. Her committee condemned the war as unjust, and encouraged workers of all belligerent countries to refuse to support their governments' war policies, and she supported a resolution demanding that any conscription program require a national referendum. In one of her columns, O'Hare wrote,

I am a Socialist, a labor unionist and a follower of the Prince of Peace FIRST; and an American, second. I will serve my class, before I will serve the country that is owned by my industrial masters…. The world is my country, the workers are my countrymen, peace and social justice are my creeds, and to these and these alone I owe loyalty and allegiance.

O'Hare toured the country, delivering essentially the same basic antiwar speech wherever she went. After presenting her remarks on July 17, 1917, in Bowman, North Dakota, she was arrested, tried, convicted and sentenced to five years under the Espionage Act.

Born in 1876 in Ottawa County in central Kansas during its boom years, Kate Richards was one of five children in a homesteading family. Her ancestors on both sides had immigrated to the American colonies, and had gradually moved west from Virginia, her father having been born in Ohio and her mother in Illinois. Her father fought for the Union during the Civil War, and her parents married the year after the war ended in 1866. Her early childhood was happy as she thrived on the farm chores as well as hunting and fishing with her siblings and father, and visiting relatives of their extended kinship network on nearby farms. She was an adventurous and curious child who idolized her father. Andrew Richards imparted to her his religious and civic concerns, and taught his children, as O'Hare later remembered, that "the only religion acceptable to God was to serve the people with all our heart and soul." He also imparted to her his political and social interests, and she listened avidly to his discussions of current events with other farmers. Lucy Richards , as a full-time homemaker, was not taken as a role model by her daughter who did not have as close a relationship to her mother as to her father.

By 1887, the Kansas economic boom had collapsed, and many homesteaders lost their land. Andrew Richards, facing economic ruin, sold his stock and moved to Kansas City, Missouri, sending for his family when he found work. The move from a rural life of self-sufficiency to urban dependency in a slum area scarred 11-year-old Kate, who later wrote, "Of that long, wretched winter … the memory can never be erased, never grow less bitter." She was upset not only by the decline in her family's fortunes but also by the plight of other dislocated families and homeless tramps.

Kate continued her education and graduated from Central High School in 1892. She developed some interest in missionary work, but the next year earned a teaching certificate at Pawnee City Academy in Nebraska and became a teacher in a one-room schoolhouse. She taught for one year, during which she started to submit columns for a Populist newspaper. However, suffering from exhaustion, she abandoned her teaching career in 1895 and was attracted to uplift work with the downtrodden of Kansas City. Her concern over existing social conditions led her, as with so many other young women of the era, to focus on the issues of public drunkenness and prostitution, and she undertook volunteer activities on behalf of the Kansas City branch of the Florence Crittenton Mission located in the city's red-light district. After months of escorting district inhabitants to the mission's programs, Richards lost confidence in such pursuits.

She went to work in the machine shop which Andrew Richards now operated. She handled correspondence and billing, and then managed to push her way into the shop as an apprentice machinist. Despite the taunts of her shopmates, she continued her work as a machinist and became one of the first women to join the International Association of Machinists. Drawn to the economic and political debates around her, she attended union meetings, and one day heard the legendary "Mother" Jones (Mary Harris Jones ), a rabble-rousing 70-year-old labor organizer. This encounter introduced her to the emerging socialist movement, to which she then devoted her life.

In October 1901, Kate enrolled in the International School of Socialist Economy in Girard, Kansas, which offered a training program for socialist organizers. There she solidified her commitment to socialism, and at the conclusion of the course married a fellow student, Francis Patrick O'Hare of St. Louis, on January 1, 1902. The newlyweds spent their honeymoon barnstorming through Kansas and Missouri as socialist organizers.

They established a home in Kansas City, Kansas, while nevertheless traveling extensively on behalf of the Socialist Party of America. They organized among Pennsylvania coalminers and immigrants in New York City. By then, Kate O'Hare's writing career began to blossom as she published features in various newspapers and magazines, and produced a series of investigative reports on working conditions in various industries. O'Hare wrote her own column for the socialist Coming Nation and started to develop a following within the movement. A son, Richard, was born in 1903, but his birth did not diminish O'Hare's activism, nor did the arrival of three more children over the next five years.

The O'Hares moved to Oklahoma Territory in 1904 where they homesteaded in tandem with Frank O'Hare's organizational activities for the party and Kate O'Hare's writings for socialist newspapers. Kate O'Hare in these years became a well-known public lecturer, especially popular at socialist encampments in the Southwest, week-long tent meetings where she and other speakers such as Eugene V. Debs, the Socialist

Party's perennial presidential candidate, drew crowds of thousands. She eclipsed her husband's influence in the socialist movement and undertook extensive speaking tours across the country. From this time through 1919, she spent much of her time on the road, juggling child-care and other family responsibilities with her public commitments as best she could.

Kate Richards O'Hare became one of the most popular Socialist Party figures, the leading woman socialist from the west and one of the most sought-after public speakers. She lectured about the need for a social democratic system to replace capitalism so that workers would enjoy the full fruits of their labor. Promoting a variety of reforms while looking toward the transformation of the economic system, she discussed dangerous working conditions, inadequate wages, and the plight of women and children in the work force. She focused attention on the exploitation of white working farmers and black sharecroppers, although she displayed the prejudices against African-Americans so rampant in her era. She also championed a number of reforms on behalf of women, including women's suffrage, enhanced educational opportunity, the elimination of prostitution, and the legalization of divorce and birth control and abortion information. Placing all of these views within a social democratic frame of reference, O'Hare was aligned to the reformist wing of the growing Socialist Party which emphasized—rather than violent revolution—piecemeal reforms to modify the free enterprise system toward collective control.

I am dangerous to the special privileges of the United States; I am dangerous to the white slaver and to the saloonkeeper; and I thank God that at this hour I am dangerous to the war profiteers of this country who rob the people.
—Kate Richards O'Hare

O'Hare served in virtually all offices of the Socialist Party between 1908 and 1917 as its following grew nationally. She was elected as a delegate to its various conventions, and she served on its National Executive Committee, its Woman's National Committee, and the International Socialist Bureau, the executive body of the international socialist movement, only the second woman to serve in that capacity, having been preceded by the renowned Rosa Luxemburg . She campaigned on the Socialist ticket for the U.S. House of Representatives in 1910 from Kansas and for the U.S. Senate in Missouri in 1916. As a woman, she was nevertheless denied entry to the party's inner circle, but her popularity with the party's rank-and-file was enormous.

Kate O'Hare and her family lived in Kansas City, Kansas, from 1909 to 1911 after they left Oklahoma. In 1911, however, they moved to what would be their most permanent home, St. Louis, when both O'Hares were invited to join the staff of a socialist monthly called the National Rip-Saw. Kate O'Hare became an assistant editor and Frank the circulation manager while she continued her speaking tours. She at once became a star attraction of the St. Louis branch of the Socialist Party and participated in various civic activities as well. She was appointed by the mayor to a municipal committee on unemployment, investigated cost-of-living issues for presentation to the Missouri State Senate Minimum Wage Commission, and was active in the local women's suffrage movement and the National Women's Trade Union League.

When World War I began in Europe in 1914, O'Hare used her columns to emphasize her socialist commitment to internationalism rather than nationalism. She scolded European socialists who supported their nations in the war, and she warned against the possibility of the United States becoming ensnared in that war. She argued that America should prohibit food and weapon exports to the belligerents, and she co-authored a play entitled "World Peace" which celebrated international brotherhood and was performed before enthusiastic audiences on the socialist lecture circuit. As the preparedness movement grew, O'Hare and many of her comrades continued to oppose it. By spring 1917, when war against Germany was imminent, O'Hare was a delegate to the Emergency Convention of the Socialist Party which was meeting at the time war was declared. She was elected to head the committee formulating party policy, and supported its endorsement of international solidarity and its condemnation of conscription and war taxes. For the next three months following the convention, she crisscrossed the country advising her audiences that capitalism was responsible for the war and that only socialism could insure international peace and harmony. She stated that perhaps support for the war could be somewhat justified "for democracy in Germany, if we had a little [more] of it at home." O'Hare also spoke of how the war was affecting women in Europe, and said that they had been reduced to "the status of breeding animals on a stock farm."

O'Hare delivered that same lecture more than 75 times, and agents of the Justice Department—who routinely monitored her talks as well as those of other critics of the war—did not believe that she was in violation of any law. Nevertheless, she was arrested in North Dakota on July 29, 1917, under the Espionage Act for her speech at Bowman on July 17, charged with a statement which she denied making that American women were now "nothing more nor less than brood sows to raise children to get into the army and be made into fertilizer." Her arrest was not so much due to the incendiary atmosphere caused by the war as a result of political infighting in Bowman unrelated to her.

Over the next four months, O'Hare raised money for her defense while witnessing the indictment of other socialist comrades and the disruption of socialist publications, including her own periodical, Social-Revolution, formerly the National Rip-Saw. She was tried in December 1917 under a clause of the Espionage Act, before a clearly unsympathetic jury and a judge who had published anti-socialist tracts and had publicly scorned career women. The jury quickly found her guilty. In her impassioned statement before being sentenced, O'Hare spoke of what she said was the essence of the case against her: "This crime … was the same charge that was brought … against George Washington and Patrick Henry,… The crime is this: 'She stirs up the people.' … I plead guilty of that crime…. For twenty years, I have done nothing but stir up the people."

She was sentenced to five years in prison and, because no federal penitentiary existed for women at that time, entered the Missouri State Penitentiary at Jefferson City on April 15, 1919, after losing an appeal of her case before the U.S. Supreme Court. She served her time in one of the oldest prisons in the country which still followed outmoded penal practices, such as the silence system during meals and the housing of contagious prisoners among the healthy. The Jefferson City facility required its inmates to perform contract labor six days a week for private manufacturers under onerous conditions. O'Hare, who was not opposed to prison work itself, denounced the existing system as scab labor. The impact of her incarceration on her was somewhat alleviated in the first months by the fact that anarchist Emma Goldman lived in the adjacent cell. These two prominent representatives of antagonistic radical movements became fast friends, as together they attempted to minister to the needs of less advantaged inmates. O'Hare also tried to research case studies of her fellow inmates for later publication, although the prison officials did not cooperate with her efforts and eventually confiscated her notes for what might have been a study of some importance to penologists. O'Hare was also prevented from teaching classes for the inmates, but she did succeed in using her influence to improve some of the prison conditions. The experience of incarceration enhanced her sense of identity with other women which she had never before really embraced, and gave her a greater appreciation of the burdens of black prisoners.

O'Hare's prison term was commuted by President Woodrow Wilson in 1920 after 14 months, and her political and civil rights were restored by presidential action soon thereafter. O'Hare quickly returned to her travels as a public speaker. The Socialist Party had fragmented during the war so, while she still considered herself a socialist, she focused on a campaign for amnesty for remaining World War I political prisoners, including her idol, Debs, who languished in the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary. In 1922, she led a so-called "children's crusade" to Washington to dramatize the plight of political prisoners; it reaped wide publicity and most of the prisoners were released in the next 18 months. Her other goal was to abolish contract labor by prisoners, an aim largely achieved in 1929 through the passage of the Hawes-Cooper Bill. In addition, she supported various progressive political activities in the 1920s.

Meanwhile, Kate O'Hare turned to a topic that had intrigued her for years, educational opportunities for workers. Labor education had been of interest to her ever since she had enrolled in a training course for organizers, and during the war she and Frank had briefly been involved in labor education in a colony in Ruskin, Florida, near Tampa. In 1922, the O'Hares joined the Llano Co-operative Colony in rural Louisiana, to which they moved their revived newspaper, the National Rip-Saw, and established a college for workers, called Commonwealth College. When factionalism soon destroyed the periodical and split the colony, the college relocated to Mena, Arkansas, where Kate O'Hare served as professor of sociology, trustee, fund raiser and field director, among other positions. The various strains, however, took their toll. Stress which dated back to the war era culminated in Kate and Frank O'Hare separating in 1924. They divorced in 1928, and that same year Kate Richards O'Hare married Charles C. Cunningham, a Southern attorney and businessman, and they settled in California.

Kate O'Hare, the name she still used as a public personality, attempted to retire to private life. However, in 1934 she re-entered the public arena when she joined the staff of Upton Sinclair's End Poverty in California (EPIC) movement during the Depression. After two years of work for EPIC, she retired briefly again but in 1937 worked on the staff of a Progressive Party congressional representative from Wisconsin, Thomas R. Amlie. In that capacity, she attempted to nudge Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal toward a more egalitarian and planned economy. The next year, with Amlie's defeat, she once more left public life. But in 1939 she accepted an appointment to assist California's Penology Department in an effort to reform and modernize the state's prison system, especially San Quentin. Many of the reforms implemented represented ideas which O'Hare had long expounded.

In 1940, at the age of 64, she finally eased out of such formal responsibilities. She continued to speak before civic groups in Benicia, California, where she and her husband lived, and she occasionally met with the State Crime Commission at the invitation of Governor Earl Warren. She was clearly a well-respected public figure. Kate Richards O'Hare Cunningham died in her home on January 10, 1948, of a heart attack at the age of 71.

sources:

Foner, Philip S., and Sally M. Miller, eds. Kate Richards O'Hare: Selected Writings and Speeches. Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1982.

Miller, Sally M. From Prairie to Prison: The Life of Social Activist Kate Richards O'Hare. Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 1993.

O'Hare, Kate Richards. Kate O'Hare's Prison Letters. Girard, KS: Appeal to Reason, 1919.

collections:

Some correspondence of Kate O'Hare's is found in the Frank P. O'Hare Papers, Missouri Historical Society, St. Louis; and some of her printed works may be found in the Socialist Party of America Collection at Perkins Library, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina.

Sally M. M. , Professor of History, University of the Pacific, Stockton, California

Women in World History: A Biographical Encyclopedia