Mary Marvin Heaton Vorse

• Mary Heaton Vorse
• Born: October 9, 1874
• Died: June 14, 1966

Labor reform writer, was born in New York City, the only child of Hiram Heaton and Ellen Cordelia (Blackman) Heaton (her mother had five older children from a previous marriage). Her father was the retired owner of the Red Lion Inn at Stockbridge, Massachusetts, and both parents came from old New England families, her mother’s family having emigrated from England in 1635. They had a comfortable income from California real estate and traveled extensively in Europe, their daughter receiving private tutoring and studying art in Paris at sixteen.

Her first marriage, in 1898, was to Albert White Vorse, a well-to-do writer, editor, and explorer; their two children, Heaton White (born in 1901) and Mary Ellen (born in 1907), were both born in New York. The Vorses in 1907 bought a house in Provincetown, Massachusetts, which became her permanent base. She was largely responsible for Provincetown’s becoming an artists’ center, and was one of the organizers of the Provincetown Players, which first staged the works of Eugene O’Neill. The company gave its first performance on the Vorses’ wharf, and she remained benevolently attached to the succeeding troupes that inherited the Provincetown name.

Mary Heaton Vorse must in her youth have seemed the least likely candidate to become an ardent reformer, crusading for the rights of workers and becoming the most ubiquitous day-to-day chronicler of America’s labor movement for half a century. Born to a life of ease, she had married into even greater luxury (as recounted in her first book, The Breaking In of a Yachtsman’s Wife, 1908). But in her late thirties, after losing her husband and mother in one day, she was obliged to support herself and her two children through her writing. She discovered her vocation in describing the living conditions of the workers’ children while reporting the great Lawrence, Massachusetts, textile-mill strike of 1912. From then on, improving the lot of the laboring masses became her life’s concern.

All of her work grew directly out of her personal experiences. Shortly after the death of her mother, Vorse depicted her in Autobiography of an Elderly Woman (1911), and in the same year she collected in Stories of the Very Little Person sketches based on the first four years of her daughter’s life. However, even after becoming involved in the labor movement, she continued, as a professional breadwinning writer, to turn out what she referred to as “lollipops”—tales of romance, marriage, and domestic life (at the time largely aimed at female readers), which kept the pot boiling.

Assigned in 1912 to report on the Lawrence strike for Harper’s Weekly, she provided such sympathetic coverage that it lost the magazine the advertising of the American Woolen Company; the editor, in giving her subsequent assignments, would jokingly urge her not to “cost us too much advertising.” “It was a new kind of strike,” she later wrote. “There had never been any mass picketing in any New England town. Ten thousand workers picketed.”

During the Lawrence strike Vorse met Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, the organizer who was to remain her lifelong friend. “When Elizabeth spoke,” she recorded, “the excitement of the workers became a visible thing. She stood up there ... the very picture of a youthful revolutionary leader.” Vorse was electrified by the experience, and thereafter the story of labor and her own were virtually one and the same. She covered every transformation of the movement, chronicling in muscular yet compassionate prose the growth, maturing, and acceptance of American labor, and even, in later years, the corruption on the New York docks.

On the Lawrence picket line she met a labor journalist, Joseph O’Brien. They were married in 1912 and had one son, Joel, born in January 1914. Shortly after her return in 1915 from the women’s peace conference at The Hague (which dismayed her by its futility), Joseph O’Brien died.

She retained the professional name of Mary Heaton Vorse for the rest of her life, reporting on the mass unemployment in New York in 1914; the miners’ struggles in the Mesabi Range of northeast Minnesota in 1916; the murder plots and frameups involving members of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), syndicalists also known as Wobblies, including her old friend from the Lawrence days, “Big Bill” Haywood; and the great steel strike of 1919-20, the basis for her Men and Steel (1921). In 1920 she married Robert Minor, a well-known political cartoonist and then secretary of the Communist Party, USA, but she never herself joined any of the radical parties; they were divorced in 1922, and she was reticent about the marriage in recording biographical data.

Vorse also wrote about the misery of the populations of war-torn Europe in World War I and its aftermath; the anti-Red hysteria in the United States in the postwar period (including the notorious Palmer Raids); the 1926 textile strike in Passaic, New Jersey; the Sacco-Vanzetti case; and the textile strike in Gastonia, North Carolina, on which she based a 1930 novel. While covering the North Carolina strike, she was accredited as an organizer of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America.

Her autobiography, A Footnote to Folly (1935), carries her life through that period, ending with a prophetic passage: “In the end we will listen to the voice of the machines. We will have to. There is no choice. We will not go back to tallow dips while the great shining wheels are there to bring us light. There is another element on the side of an orderly society. It is the people who grow the food, and who run the machines—they and their children.”

Vorse’s commitment to labor and to the welfare of children (which, she said, first brought her to it) remained the guiding light of her life. Her Labor’s New Millions (1938), recounting the tribulations and triumphant success of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), grew out of her coverage of the stormy auto workers’ sitdown strike and the steel workers’ strike of the mid-1930s. Her son Heaton, who by now often accompanied her in her work, was wounded in 1937 during one of these at Muncie, Indiana, and she herself was grazed by a policeman’s bullet while picketing in Youngstown, Ohio. It was these epochal strikes that finally established the principle of collective bargaining; she characterized a later (1949) strike at Youngstown as “a restrained, almost a puritanical strike,” for the town had come to depend upon its organized workers for its prosperity.

She remained deeply attached to Province-town, where she had once conducted a Montes-sori school, and wrote of the place in Time and the Town (1942). She continued writing professionally until almost ninety, and received the United Auto Workers’ Social Justice Award in 1962. She died in Provincetown at ninety-one.

The forty crucial years in the development of the modern American labor movement come alive in the vivid writing of Mary Heaton Vorse. She was a front-line correspondent, deeply engaged on the human side of trade unionism yet sufficiently detached to be reliable. More than any other labor writer of her time, she appealed to the hearts and minds of middle-class readers, helping them to understand the needs and aspirations of working people. As a reformer, she was a sturdy friend to social justice; as a journalist, she expressed her compassion and involvement in writing that was, in the words of Harold Stearns, “packed with tenderness and a quiet bitterness, like sugar and vinegar.”

Vorse’s published volumes include (in addition to the biographical works cited above) The Heart’s Country (1913); The Ninth Man (1918); The Prestons (1918); I’ve Come to Stay (1919); Growing Up (1920); Fraycar’s First (1923); Passaic (1926); Second Cabin (1928); Strike-A Novel of Gastonia (1930); and Here Are the People (1943). Many magazine pieces and stories are uncollected. There is no full-length biography, but sketches or extensive references to her are found in Twentieth Century Authors (1942; and First Supplement, 1955); D. Day, The Long Loneliness (1952); M. Kempton, Part of Our Time: Some Ruins and Monuments (1955); and R. O. Boyer and E. M. Morais, Labor’s Untold Story (1955). The Oral History Collection of Columbia University includes her reminiscences (1957). See also Who Was Who in America, vol. 4 (1968), and the informative sketch in Notable American Women: The Modern Period (1980), which establishes an accurate birth date from public records. Obituaries appeared in The New York Times, June 15, 1966; Time, June 24, 1966; and Publishers Weekly, June 27, 1966.